This is hard for me. It is very hard to be vulnerable when you do not feel safe. And it is very hard to feel safe if you are being vulnerable...
It is very anxiety provoking to be authentic when you do not feel safe. I would rather run from the conversation, or even hint of a conversation than have to talk about messy feelings. I would prefer to run. Or numb the feelings I do not know how to manage or even, sometimes, figure out.
I have learned, for me, there is a supreme value in safety as a precursor to vulnerability and perhaps, eventually, intimacy.
What is weird for me is that people are often surprised when I say being vulnerable is hard for me. They say things like, “you are so open”, “you are so non-judgmental”, “you are free and receptive...” Yes, I am about YOU! I will talk about your shit all fucking day. But ask me how I feel. What I really think about you, or me or God forbid, US. Then I have a lot less to say and most people don’t even notice...
I can’t tell you how many relationships I have had where other people just made assumptions about what I felt and thought. They were based on their own ideas about who I am and they were often shocked to find out that I didn’t actually feel the way they thought I did at all. And because I really dislike being vulnerable, I certainly didn’t offer it up.
I believe everyone has a baseline for vulnerability. Many people walk around feeling pretty safe most of the time. They do not feel like their feelings will kill them dead on the daily. They are ok if they get hurt, not something they want, for sure, but they know they will survive regardless.
But there are those of us who are not so sure about that. I have spent more time of my life running away from shit I think or feel than I care to own right here. If you scare me badly enough, I will completely disappear from your life. And this often comes as a shock because I feel like I present steady, able, reliably, and presently. So when I take off it seems like a shocking thing for me to do...but if the person was paying attention they would have seen the signs from the outset.
I talk about you and your issues and rarely volunteer my own. Or if I do, I talk about shit from a million years ago...about a person I once was but am no longer. I tend to deflect and move the topic back to you, if you do ask me about me. And in today’s world, most people want to talk about themselves so this is not hard to do.
Historically speaking, I think it was hard for me because I never even thought to ask the question about safety. I didn’t ever think that that was something I should look for. I just kind of meandered through life with this idea that life, people, relationships were inherently unsafe...and that was just the way life was.
I learned, quite painfully, that what I learned and then replicated was that I was not safe. I did not heed my own boundaries and I was not honest about how I felt, what I was doing and the like. I was always trying to project an image which is a bar to all intimacy. Vulnerability? You cannot project an image AND be vulnerable. It just isn’t possible! And I was always more concerned that you thought I was fabulous and all put together, so I certainly wasn’t going to tell you what I really thought, felt and did. I can see now that this was a epic fail on my part for all concerned.
I have had to dismantle my former ways, one mother fucking day at a time. All with the goal of creating a life and people in it that were safe. People I believed wanted good things for me and would not take advantage. I have not done a great job at that historically. Like everyone else with trauma, I have tended to pick the people that replicate the traumatic response so that I can finally and forever get it worked out. And like everyone else, it has been a huge failure, repeatedly.
But maybe it hasn’t. I have grown, I have changed and now I feel like I am asking better questions. Can I be real? Can I be honest? Can I be vulnerable? And with that person? I never asked that last part before...I always just did the same shit regardless of the person. I now ask myself the harder question: “Do I think this person is capable of reciprocating? Can this person do intimacy or are they fucked up like me?” And then altering my behavior accordingly. That was always the issue before, I would either fail to evaluate the other person’s capacity for intimacy or over estimate my own. Both tend to end in a very similar dumpster fire.
Vulnerability for me starts with telling the truth. Not the truth I want you to know, not the one I wish were true but the actual fucking truth. And if I can’t do that, I can just forget about intimacy as any kind of goal. If I can’t be honest with you, then we are never getting anywhere at all. If you can’t be honest with me, same result. And I am not talking about brutal, raw, open honesty. I am just talking about the kind of honesty that allows for you to say how you really feel, without pandering to the other person’s ego or sympathies. This is harder than it seems...at least for me.
When you are standing there in front of me, I really want to tell you what you want to hear. And I want that to be honest, but often times, I get all tangled up in your expectations and my desire not to let you down and then I end up saying shit that hurts us both. I am working on this but I think it will be my struggle until my dying day. Somewhere way back in time, I decided my feelings were mine personally and my refusal to share them with you was the only real power I have ever had. I still believe this, it is hard to let go of...
But I do believe this is where my work lies. In this place where I have the courage to share me, unadulterated, unaltered by my desire to impress you, or shock you, or wow you. Just me being me, you being absolutely free to reject or accept whatever version of me shows up. It is all ok. I don’t have to make it work, I don’t have to dazzle you. That is not my job. I am just supposed to be me and you will do whatever you do...
One of the bravest things I have done lately is to just allow it all to be just as it is. I am trying to keep my palm open...to allow whatever lands to land and to stay as long as it likes while I process how I feel about the landing and the impending departure or remaining. How do I feel about you? I would much prefer to think about how you feel about me...and then attempt to change or alter that according to what I think and feel. If you like me, maybe I want you to do that a little less or more. Then I know what to do. It is a much harder question to evaluate how I feel about you. And I have avoided doing this hard work by trying to help you with how you feel about me.
I guess today what vulnerability means to me is that I have to allow you to be you, make your own decisions and not come over there and try to “help”. I am supposed to stay over here and figure out how I feel and what I want and then have the courage to express that to you honestly, openly and without agenda. That is a hard ask most days for me.
I am not sure I am ever going to get better at it. So far it feels like I just keep starting and stopping and then back peddling and then having to start all over again from square one. But I know there is progress there. And I know that I am becoming a safer person and so then attracting safer people into my world. That feels like progress...
I am never going to be someone who likes being vulnerable but I do hope that one day I can become someone who tolerates it better...and my part, I think, is to just keep moving forward and trying. I am gonna fail but I am gonna succeed too.
Honesty, safety will always sow the seeds for vulnerability and intimacy. And proceeding to be vulnerable without feeling safe is always going to produce the same effect in me: fleeing. Whether you know I have flown or not. Sometimes I left years earlier and you didn’t have a clue. Not bragging, admitting that I have left relationships years before I actually left is a hard thing and I feel super shitty about it.
I think the hardest opinion I will ever have to withstand is my own. It is hard to be here living this life and allowing you to see me, tell you how I feel and open up. I prefer things so much more surfacey. So much easier to tell you what I think you want to hear and keep my honest and true feelings separate and apart. But I know that I will never, ever get to a place where I can be vulnerable and intimate with you if I am not willing to withstand the discomfort of my own thoughts and feelings. How can I expect you to do that when I will not do it for myself?
Hard questions for a Tuesday! But it is what I woke up thinking about so here you have it. Safety is something that I really wish I would have thought about earlier in my life, I might have been further along by now. But I didn’t and it is what it is. I am doing it now. Working to change my own long standing patterns that always provide me comfort but never make me happy.
I guess the choice is always the same, grow and change and increase your expanse every day of your life, or refuse to grow and change and watch your own dysfunction proliferate. Seems like a hard choice some days. But so far, I continue to select the upward movement...the evolution of my soul. And I share it with whomever is brave enough or bored enough to read it. Take what you like and leave the rest, I guess.
Again...still.
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