Sometime after our first dates I with John two great truths about myself, two things he needed to know if the relationship continued unfolding the way it seemed to be.
The first was that he was NOT convenient. My life was very nice without him, thank you, and I did not feel that being single made me less a person. Quite the contrary. I'd finally gotten my life into a semblance of balance & REALLY did not want it whacked out by really & truly falling in love.
Playing in love - that was fine. It was manageable & relatively pain-free. But REAL love? Yikes! I was inexperienced in real loving, but knew that it was disaster to any easy sense of centered being.
The second great truth was that being really & truly in real & true love would make me vulnerable. And I had a huge fear of vulnerability because it was my natural way & had been the cause of what felt like breathtaking betrayals.
Being in love with John left me not only wide open to being vulnerable, something in me KNEW that being vulnerable was part of the deal. But from the start, there was never any choice - love was always there.
Since those earliest days, awareness of vulnerability has been front & center in our relationship. Ah, but HOW we view it has changed immensely, thanks to teaching high school biology to at-risk students. That's when I discovered that the quality of vulnerability is ESSENTIAL to our health, because it is the quality that allows things into & out of our cells. The light dawned! Vulnerability is a good thing, that our health depends on letting things in & letting them go out. Eureka!
With that awareness, my life changed. Turned out that vulnerability, which I'd always experienced as a negative to protect against, is an essential, to be appreciated.
That was where I more or less left my feelings about vulnerability - it was good, it was essential for my emotional health & the emotional health of my relationship with John & for our marriage. But my understanding of WHAT vulnerability actually is was still limited to the image of the cell relying on its ability to let things in & let things out. Until late last fall, when I discovered Brene Brown.
Brene was introduced to me via a TED talk, one of many I played without knowledge of the subject. As she started her presentation, "life changer" didn't occur to me. But boy, did it!
Okay, I'd gotten past my forever sense that vulnerability was something to be avoided at all costs. But here was a well-spoken, well-informed woman describing in reasonable terms WHAT it is. Zowie!
Imagine my feelings, reading the title of her 2012 TED Q&A - Being vulnerable about vulnerability. Did it feel like a homecoming? Oh, yeah!
When Brene first became a phenom - in 2010 - I was in a crucible of crises, not ready to hear her message. The titles of her books - I Thought It Was Just Me (and it isn't) & The Gifts of Imperfect - would never have clicked.
For some reason, I associated Brene with understanding shame, which didn't resound with me. It's doubtful I'd ever have looked at her 2012 TED talk, Listening to Shame. Wouldn't relate, not even seven months ago - still too raw.
Praise be, I love rambling around cyber space, where I stumbled across her 2010 TEDxHouston presentation, The power of vulnerability. Interesting - this would have been around October 2015. Fascinating timing. It was possibly the first time I was ready to hear what Brene had to share.
Ready? I was rarin' to hear her! Still remember my breath going shallow & rapid reading her described as someone who "studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love." Again, the sense that came over me was of homecoming. Of being within the safety of a long-sought tribe.
The past eight months have been an orgy of reading & rereading, journaling & discussing Brene. Amazed to report that John & I are about to listen to Men, Women & Worthiness - together.
At the 26-year mark in our marriage, we are going to circle back to the beginning, back to my feeling wary because a) wholehearted loving would leave me utterly vulnerable ~and~ b) there was nothing to be done about it, because I was over-the-moon in love with this guy from the moment we met. At this point in time, we'll be present with the awareness that vulnerability is essential to healthy loving, that it makes it possible for anything to be done.
Will keep you in the loop!
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