Vulnerability Bender

I've been on a vulnerability bender for the last month, and it feels like it's killing me sometimes.



It started with writing We Can Become Known in February, and then continued with a bunch of other pieces I've written since then, including I'm Speaking My Truth and Spreading the Word, Because It Does Get Better, and most days now it seems like a pretty good idea to stay in bed with some hot coffee and pretend that I just woke up on some other day a long time ago when I didn't feel so vulnerable.

I'm not depressed really. I'm just really broken open, like a soft meat seed pod that's been split down the middle, and the wind's having its way with redistributing my innards.

My anxiety about it all dresses itself up as shame burning up the back of my neck, and I feel consumed by self-doubt and self-loathing. It creeps in sometimes when I've been feeling open for too long. It's a self-defensive reflex. The scared voice inside me tells me that I'm bad, not because I am bad but because it knows I will stop and withdraw if I feel bad enough. I am afraid of being hurt.

The scared voice inside me is a little kid afraid of the dark. Growth and change redefines my boundaries, and the new limitations those boundaries map out make me feel naked, and not the good kind of naked.

I don't know if it's the moon or the planets or something I elicit when I give off a certain mood, but everyone was tossing their vulnerability around yesterday in a mad fit of self-exposure, and it was both poignant and distressing. I was busted open, I received emails from other people who were busted open, and even my Friday night junk food delivery guy was busted open. I've only ever seen him once before, but he told me how his cat of 15 years had died a number of years ago, and that he'd never had another because he didn't think his heart could take the weight of loving so much. I imagined taking the food delivery guy into my arms for comfort while I pressed the buttons on the debit machine.

I wrote for seven hours straight yesterday until I finally collapsed and cried in the dark, because it hurts to be human, and that was good, even when I punched myself in the hip to keep from wailing out loud next to my open bedroom window. It has been a long time since I cried like that. I needed to let off the steam. It puts trouble at rest to let it out to rabble-rouse once in a while.

The next step in my personal brand of self-therapy this morning, after putting this little number out there, is to have a shower, paint my fingernails bright red, and take the Palinode out for a late breakfast like regular human beings do. I can't lie around being an aching, busted open seed pod 24/7. I like food too much, and there's a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing that has my name on it.

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PS.  This is what I wrote exactly one year ago at Aiming Low: "Anxiety, Panic Attacks, And What Gets Us Through". Vive la annual révolution!

PPS.  I just got an email about something huge for me that has been a major part of this whole vulnerability breakdown, and it is wonderful, fabulous, good, really excellent news, which I'm not going to tell you about yet, because life's a bitch sometimes, and I would be remiss if I didn't contribute.

25 Things That Make Me Feel Vulnerable

1. Big men passing by me on the sidewalk at night
2. Staying sober
3. Going to the bathroom with the door open
4. Falling in love
5. Writing poetry
6. One of my molars breaking
7. Buying presents for people
8. Going barefoot
9. Thong underwear
10. Tax season
11. Having my photo taken
12. Flying in an airplane
13. Sex
14. Funerals
15. Bra fittings
16. Speaking in public
17. Showering when no one else is home
18. Cancer
19. Using our building's laundry room at night
20. Being unable to find my glasses
21. The downward drift of some of my body parts
22. Being touched
23. People crying in front of me
24. Watching the news
25. Telling people what I believe in

25 Things Of Which I Am Afraid

See also my subsequent list, "25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave".


Bonus extra fear: what's under every manhole cover I step on.

1. I am afraid that we are just as smart as we think we are.
2. I am afraid that, when I finally do go to a dentist, they are going to have to do something, anything, to my teeth and/or gums.
3. I am afraid that I will die by freak electrocution if I bathe during a rainstorm.
4. I am afraid that I will have to spend my elder years living in a tent without electricity because we killed the earth.
5. I am afraid that something might be in my closet when the door is closed, but I feel insecure, as though I need to batten down the hatches, when the door is open.
6. I am afraid that I might be the only one who loves this hard.
7. I am afraid that, when I give blood, the little finger-pricker thing will be missing its spring and will stab me in the bone again like that one time in 1995.
8. I am afraid that I might not have my words when I need them.
9. I am afraid that there might really be ghosts in my apartment, and I just can't see them.
10. I am afraid that the Palinode will die before we have a chance to get very old together.
11. I am afraid that I will die before the Palinode and I have a chance to get very old together.
12. I am afraid that I will run out of my allotment of near death experiences.
13. I am afraid that I will get cancer again, because I had it too easy the first time.
14. I am afraid that, because my apartment building is old, I could fall through the floor into the basement at any moment.
15. I am afraid that I will never have a really restful, comfortable sleep again in my life.
16. I am afraid that I will never be great.
17. I am afraid that I will die in a plane crash.
18. I am afraid that I will become one of those old people who ends up forgotten and eating cat food until someone finds her body months later because I had no children.
19. I am afraid that someone will shut down the internet.
20. I am afraid that I will somehow end up unconscious in the hospital, and someone will decide to give me penicillin, and I will die before ever regaining consciousness.
21. I am afraid that I will never write books.
22. I am afraid that, if I do write books, they will be terrible, and I will look back on them years later with shame.
23. I am afraid that my adult acne will never go away, and I will be the only eighty-year-old still using zit cream.
24. I am afraid that I might be dysfunctional for not feeling sad about the inevitable lessening of the mass production of paper books.
25. I am afraid that, because my concern about my recent addiction to Thirtysomething on Netflix outweighs my nostalgic fear about the state of books, I am much more dysfunctional than I fear.