On the potential assets of vulnerability

I know this blog post gets a bit long. First I summarize the salient points of her talk, and then I talk about why they are important to me.

Brené Brown TED talk

Brené Brown is a social worker / anthropologist / ethnographer who studies the connections between people, why and how they happen. She specializes in studying shame and vulnerability. I didn't think anyone had ever studied that, but I was interested to listen. In this talk she sort of explains how she came to study these topics and the most important information she has gleaned on them, from doing thousands of interviews with people. I invite you to go listen to the talk before or after reading this blog entry, or bookmark it if you don't have the time. The quotes here are just-about-right-but-maybe-not-exactly. I was typing pretty fast because transcribing from her talk.

So she started off her doctoral work interviewing people about their human connections.

"When I asked people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection." 

These interviews gave her the opposite data than she expected. "I found something that totally unraveled the idea of connection for me, and that was shame. Shame is the fear of disconnection. The idea that underpinned shame was excruciating vulnerability. In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen."

So in her research, she set out to "deconstruct" shame and the idea of vulnerability. 

"If I roughly took the people I interviewed.. and divided them into people who .. have a sense of worthiness ... a strong sense of love and belonging ... and folks who always wonder if they are good enough... there was only one variable that separated [those people]  people who have a strong sense of love and belonging ... believe they are worthy of love and belonging."

She examined all the interviews of the people who were living with a strong sense that they are worthy and wanted to figure out how they did that. She described these people as "wholehearted." The three characteristics of wholehearted people she enumerated as "Courage, compassion, connection. The original definition of courage being, not a synonym for bravery, but to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. The courage to be imperfect. The compassion to be kind to themselves first, and then to others... They had connection as a result of authenticity." The fourth thing they had in common was that they "fully embraced vulnerability. What made them vulnerable made them beautiful." 

OKAY HERE'S WHERE I COME IN:

This talk really hits home for me, especially right about now. I still have to force myself to go outside using my white cane. Yesterday the light was such that I could almost convince myself I didn't really need the cane. It wasn't searingly bright; it wasn't dark; it wasn't raining. I could have just gone out without it. Never mind the street crossings, people on bicycles, endless and different-every day construction that forces me to walk in the street and off the sidewalk on our hill, which cars just fly up and down at a high rate of speed. I thought, "I am not going to make it outside today if I have to use this f*ing cane."

But I told myself, I PLEDGED to myself that if I was going to start using it, I would use it full time, as I had originally been using it in Columbus. Why did I do that? Well for starters, probably because I knew it would be too easy to "take back" my vow if I didn't put that clause in it. I'm very good at rationalizing what I don't want to deal with. Secondly, it would allow consistency in my own brain and the brains of others. The idea here is to not only incorporate the cane for practical reasons but integrate it into my overall identity. If I'm able to say, "oh, but not today," then my progress, as a person, would stay where it's been for the last x-number of years. I would not be accepting a fundamental part of myself. 

And that's where the shame comes in. I have a *lot* of shame about my body. The disability stuff is only the half of it. And using the cane is basically taking that festering shame sore, or whatever, and rubbing gravel into it. Like HERE I AM WORLD, SHOWING OFF MY SHAME.

Not that I intellectually think I should be ashamed of having a disability. The opposite actually. All my parts, even the broken ones, are a part of me. I would not be me without them. I'd be some other girl.

It's just that I got so many messages as a child that I should be ashamed. I don't think the people sending the messages meant to indicate that I should have shame, but that was the lesson that got communicated. 

Here's an example: You are just like everyone else and you can do everything that a normal kid does.

The goal of this person / people was probably to encourage independence in me, to foster self-esteem. The thing is, I wasn't just like everyone else. I couldn't do everything that a normal kid did. But I tried. And failed. And felt shitty about it. And failed again. And again. And again. And the other kids made fun of me and let me know just how absolutely I was failing. So there were two subconscious lessons that my brain took in here. 1) You suck at being normal and 2) It is better to be normal than being what you know deep down you are.

There was a part in the talk where Brown speaks of how her research was affecting her personal life. She likes to control and quantify, so she was devastated at first when she found out that the issue of vulnerability was at the core of her research. And she said something like [paraphrasing here], "You know the kind of people who find out that they have an issue with vulnerability and they just decide to surrender and walk into it? Well, I'm not like that. Furthermore, I don't even hang out with people like that."

That's me. I've been told by some very good, smart people whose opinions I respect that the way to get through shame is to allow myself to be vulnerable and I'm like F*** THAT.

I know I've been going on about this blog and "radical openness" and all that. But it's a freaking slog to be radically open. I hate it. It does not come naturally. I am private. I am guarded. I am mistrustful. I have some anger management issues. And a big Sword of Damocles sized anxiety hovering over me if not at all, then at most times.

Today I have a job interview. It's for a job that I've been chasing for nearly a year now. It's with a good organization that I really believe in. I'm having paranoid thoughts though:

a) even though there has been no indication of this being a factor, they will somehow decide that, because of my visual impairment, I am unfit to do this job;
b) that I will have an attack of fibro fog in the middle of the interview and start losing words, getting flustered, losing more words. The cats kept me up all last night cos Mike wasn't home. So I didn't sleep well. I'm pounding the caffeine. I used to be GREAT in interviews. Charming. Charismatic. Genuine. Now today I worry I will show myself as genuinely unable to have a conversation.
c) That they will google me (I bet all bosses or potential bosses do this now), find this blog, and tell me to shut it down or I can't have the job. 

I am praying that these thoughts have no merit to them. Because part of me is like, "Yes Brené Brown! [and other people who tell me this stuff] You are amazing! Your work is amazing! You are right! I need to let myself be vulnerable and authentic and live whole heartedly, etc." 

But the world doesn't work like that. Overall, it doesn't. And she addresses this in the second half of her talk. She addresses it, but there's no solution except for everyone to decide that "genuine" is the way to live. At the top of Corporate Reasons to Not Be Genuine is profit. Second on that list is Covering Your Ass. So my mistrustful side and my trying-to-heal side are going at it. In my head. Especially today.

Please send me some good energy so I can deal with whatever happens.