[working definitions] vulnerability

[kaberett]

I've been noticing, working my way through Brené Brown's books, that many of the ways in which she defines or exemplifies vulnerability are just... not intuitive to me. They don't stick; they're an active effort to think my way through every single time I try to engage with the concepts involved. "To be vulnerable is to be capable of being hurt; to be weak is to be unable to withstand injury" is a definition she suggests that sort of works for me on an abstract level -- I at least don't have to work to remember it -- but I don't experience any emotional resonance with it.

Here's an alternative I've been turning over: vulnerability is offering people more complete data so as to enable them to better model me.

On the one hand, I can sort of see that it might sound more impersonal, more abstracted, than the explanation proposed in the previous paragraph -- and on the other it's one that I am viscerally attuned to, to the point that typing it out leaves me hyper-aware of my belly and my throat, of my physical softness, of my -- yes -- vulnerability made manifest. ("The delicacy of my skin" might need to feature in a poem, hmm.)

It seems to be a succinct and internally intuitive way for me to encode the thought-shape of hope-and-fear inherent in letting people see me by showing them how to hurt me (by telling them how I work), with its mirror terror that even if I try I won't be understood.

Comments

[rugessnome]

not saying this is applicable to you--for me, idk, being ridiculous is fine! great! I like being ridiculous (I say this tongue in cheek, though, because people laughing at things I take more seriously can Hurt)

but the big thing is that with my past and possibly even predispositions, when telling people I like something, the response can bleed into moral judgment territory in my brain, into existential anxiety, into "you are a Terrible Bad person" and um that's... ouch.

[kaberett]

I can see that <3 For me I have got enough "fuck you I do what I want" about Fierce Defiant Joy that I mostly... don't? I'm pretty secure about the ways in which I enjoy all the things people might Pass Moral Judgment about?

For me it's not really a problem until I... want something that's inherently not solitary: wanting someone to want [me, in the context of whatever shared activity, as myself and not for whatever function I can fulfil for them], daring to think that they actually might is... where my shame comes in, but that's very much at the human-interaction level.