A thing I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years, but struggling to get a grip on, is how much of my time I've spent feeling lonely & isolated & disconnected, and trying to work out how to mitigate that without compromising safety in ways that are intolerable to me. I've been thinking about it in part because I feel like I used to know how to form positive connections with people and then... lost it... around a series of unfortunate social implosions; I've been trying to work out how to find a way out of that. To, I think, work out safe ways to take down some of the shielding. (I have a longer post coming on this topic but it's... got a couple of things I want to say before I get that far, and they're both long too, and my wordsbrain keeps going on thesis, so Who Knows how long it'll be.)
Reading Brown is one of the things I'm doing in service of that goal. She is... very definite about the audience she thinks she's writing to; with this book, she's definitely targetting "people who think vulnerability inherently means weakness, and that weakness inherently means unworthiness" & is addressing them, rather than, you know, anyone with a more disability-informed perspective.
Which is, of course, some of why what she has to say lands wide of the mark for an audience of me.
I think.... that possibly a thing I'm trying to do, also, is draw a distinction between situations where I am vulnerable in the sense of open/honest/whole/seeking connection, and vulnerable because I am insecure or disadvantaged or seeking dispensation from someone with more power than me. And I think the former is the sense that Brown is trying to go for, which I think overlaps with your "we will hold each other's fragilities with care".
Language is difficult and words are slippery; does that make sense?
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-10 11:27 pm (UTC)A thing I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years, but struggling to get a grip on, is how much of my time I've spent feeling lonely & isolated & disconnected, and trying to work out how to mitigate that without compromising safety in ways that are intolerable to me. I've been thinking about it in part because I feel like I used to know how to form positive connections with people and then... lost it... around a series of unfortunate social implosions; I've been trying to work out how to find a way out of that. To, I think, work out safe ways to take down some of the shielding. (I have a longer post coming on this topic but it's... got a couple of things I want to say before I get that far, and they're both long too, and my wordsbrain keeps going on thesis, so Who Knows how long it'll be.)
Reading Brown is one of the things I'm doing in service of that goal. She is... very definite about the audience she thinks she's writing to; with this book, she's definitely targetting "people who think vulnerability inherently means weakness, and that weakness inherently means unworthiness" & is addressing them, rather than, you know, anyone with a more disability-informed perspective.
Which is, of course, some of why what she has to say lands wide of the mark for an audience of me.
I think.... that possibly a thing I'm trying to do, also, is draw a distinction between situations where I am vulnerable in the sense of open/honest/whole/seeking connection, and vulnerable because I am insecure or disadvantaged or seeking dispensation from someone with more power than me. And I think the former is the sense that Brown is trying to go for, which I think overlaps with your "we will hold each other's fragilities with care".
Language is difficult and words are slippery; does that make sense?