If you caught me for a long conversation sometime over the last two years, you definitely would have heard me drop ‘vulnerability’ at least once. The concept of vulnerability first gained prominence in my life in 2018 when, after the shocking death of an acquaintance, I began reflecting on how toxic masculinity played a part in the silence of emotional pain in my acquaintance and I’s circle. I participated in a counseling group called ‘Men & Masculinity’ (that of course couldn’t even get enough men to join) and took a big step in chipping away a guise of perfection that I so frequently and naturally threw up. That journey didn’t stop and today has been fueled by a deeper exploration of vulnerability in faith & in love.
Regardless of the context, as someone who constantly sought control over people’s perception of myself and who felt a lot of rejection in childhood, slowly lowering my defenses and baring my more unsteady parts has been both incredibly challenging and surprisingly rewarding. My favorite ‘benefit’ of becoming more vulnerable has been connecting with people from various walks of life in ways that a younger me never could have imagined. I’ve gotten jobs, made new friends, and felt more emotion by sharing uncomfortable truths. This newsletter, too, is a product of this journey. I feel pretty unqualified and exposed by putting these still-developing personal thoughts out in writing (and on the Internet!) but I do believe that this iteration of vulnerability in my life, too, will take me to unexpected places.
In 1950, a 22-year-old Jean Vanier was just beginning the naval career that he had been preparing for since he was 13, when abruptly one day, he told his father that he felt a strong calling to do ‘something else’. Vanier had no practical reason beyond his gut feeling nor an idea for what that ‘else’ would be. Almost 70 years later, Jean Vanier, as a globally renowned theologian, philosopher, and activist whose name is floated for sainthood, still looks at this vulnerable conversation between a strong and structured military father with his unsure and directionless son as truly pivotal for his life. Vanier’s father surprised him and assured him to trust his intuitions and desires, freeing him from a perspective of rigidity, security, and strength to begin a foray into a world of constant change, ambiguity, and fragility.
One of Jean Vanier’s most famous contributions to humanity is his L’Arche communities, whose mission is to “provide homes and workplaces where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers, create inclusive communities of faith and friendship, and transform society through relationships that cross social boundaries.”
I learned about Jean Vanier and L’Arche through his interview with Krista Tippet on her OnBeing podcast. This conversation resonated with me in many ways and taught me how we are all fragile and why we all struggle with being vulnerable in some form or another. Check out the unedited version if you have the chance. Jean Vanier’s voice is rich, frail, and filled with humility. And his wisdom is immense.
https://onbeing.org/programs/jean-vanier-the-wisdom-of-tenderness/
Valuing Fragility
Vanier came away from his time building L’Arche believing that at the core of every soul is a desire to be loved and seen as someone of value. Unfortunately, many souls go long without that acceptance. For the people of L’Arche, our society’s capitalist and ableist principles render them “use”-less. Use meaning something that one is good at in order to achieve some productive end. "Use" being our measuring stick for how we judge causes a collective devaluation of our most fragile. And because every soul yearns for that acceptance, when the world is shunning, that lack of love is deeply felt. Vanier was devastated to find how many of his community saw themselves as burdens and struggled to find meaning in their lives, internalizing what our society pushes out.
Right now, my grandmother (Dadi) is our family’s most fragile member. She is in her mid-90s, and at this point cannot leave her bed, cannot eat on her own, forgets the names and faces of people, and is in and out of the hospital every month. Seeing the difficulty on our faces (my extended family’s & my Dadi’s), doctors have urged us for a couple of years now to send her to hospice care or to stop bringing her to the hospital whenever she got ill, suggesting that there is not much more *reason* to keep fighting for her life. The doctors’ exhortations weigh heavily on our family, for sure. Aunts & uncles, cousins & siblings have all vented their frustrations and pointed fingers at one another about not doing their supposed share of responsibility of her care.
I watch my poor grandma listen to her children and grandchildren, though she may not fully understand the words being spoken, internalize the tone of people seeing her as a burden. On those days, she is irritable, unresponsive, and willing to die.
But on other days, when these fights are replaced by showers of love, she laughs again, tells hilarious stories and jokes, and is re-energized with a will to live. I truly believe that Dadi, who grew up in the villages of Bangladesh with no running water or electricity, has lived such a long life because they were more days where she received love and value than when she did not. That’s real shit.
The toxic practice of assigning love and value based on someone’s “use”, i.e. what we are good at, not only does violence to our most vulnerable populations, but they also harm the whole of society. All humans have fragile pieces inside them. We are born in extreme vulnerability and we leave in extreme vulnerability; it is a part of our existence. We all experience a fear of death, a need for love, and a search for purpose. Yet, we also endeavor to prove that we are ‘cool’, or morally spotless, that we don’t get nervous, or don’t sometimes regress into old habits, that we don’t change our minds, or have regrets, as if brokenness is not a part of our normal lives.
There are certainly ways to minimize the brokenness, or at least give us and others the appearance that we have nothing to be vulnerable about, like having big bank accounts, building walls, sticking with the familiar. I mean, it makes sense to listen to listen to our fears and heed their warnings, but aggrandizing security to the point of totally avoiding pain & discomfort limits us from vulnerability and causes us to bottle things up. Let’s face it, we all will face pain in our lives; it is not something that we can optimize away.
In particularly structure & strength oriented cultures, (throws me back to thinking through toxic masculinity), there is a sense that if someone sees what is broken in us, we will not be loved. Vanier argues that a failure to acknowledge our own weaknesses weakens our compassion, “…if we don’t know quite what to do with our pain, how are we to know what to do with the pain of others? If we don’t know what to do with our weakness, except to hide it or pretend it does not exist, how can we welcome fully the weakness of another?” Vanier’s idea? Let’s reorient our values around fragility and strength. Vanier pushes for a more unconditional language of love. Instead of saying we love someone because of how beautiful, clever, or skilled they are, can we create a paradigm and language of love that treasures someone because of how human they are?
In this harrowing yet rousing song off of Father John Misty’s last album, his most vulnerable to date, FJM has his own meditation on the fragility inherent to being, well, a person. Through his croons, you hear an FJM who deeply felt pain but also has seen a light through his brokenness. The song also weaves in FJM’s own spin on building a paradigm of acceptance and love versus one of strength. Check it out!
Building a Paradigm of Unconditional Love
(Or at least how I am building my framework)
I draw inspiration from this quote whenever I am feeling rejected or unloved. Rumi was a Sufi scholar and poet from 13th century Turkey, who is somehow America’s best-selling poet and a figurehead for modern-day romantics everywhere. Rumi’s poems on love, however, are actually meditations on his relationship to Allah. Because of that, his poems take on a deeper meaning. The Sufis see God as a Oneness that exists in all of reality, very much including our souls (super complicated theology, I’m still learning haha). This specific quote teaches that unconditional love/God is not something that is found externally and just comes to you, but rather love already exists within us. We just have to begin the process of removing what blinds us from it.
When I was studying Buddhism, I learned about the loving-kindness meditation. Meditating on loving-kindness involves honing and cultivating love in your life through a series of mantras and mental practices. I lean on the loving-kindness framework when I find myself judging myself or others for longer than passing moments. The process involves first learning to unconditionally love yourself, then people neutral to you, next people you dislike, and finally to all of humanity. Read about the specific mantras here.
As you can see, faith has been a driving force in how I have been thinking about vulnerability these days (Vanier’s Catholic, Rumi’s Muslim, and loving-kindness comes from Buddhism). But, I think it’s really cool and interesting that these three religions locate the origin point of unconditional love at oneself. They’ve got to be onto something here. Loving yourself involves accepting the reality of what makes you beautiful, i.e. where you are strong AND where you are fragile. But why is 'loving yourself' such a fundamental starting point for love across these three different faiths? I think that common wisdom appears because people avoid being vulnerable about a part of themself due to a fear of rejection that creates more pain or shame about that thing. But, as I’ve come to see, it is very hard to predict how people will react to something. I think a lot of that fear of rejection actually comes from an inner critic inside of us, judging and criticizing the parts of ourselves we do not yet accept. That critic only clouds our perspective on how we then view and appraise others. So, I think silencing that critic is critical to acceptance and love.
Roadblocks to Vulnerability
Pain & Failure
Some days people will tell me “Wow, you’re one of the most vulnerable friends I have” other days people legit tell me, “You seem like you don’t like to share vulnerable parts of yourself”. Despite trying to be more open and honest, I still fumble many times, opting to be more closed than open or seeking more security. But, I think that is ok. It’s pretty tough to be vulnerable. It’s not really a race to be “the most vulnerable”. Doing so kind of defeats the whole purpose. If being vulnerable is exposing the parts that make you feel fragile, then the process should always be nerve-wracking and challenging. This picture helps me think about how the process is - gradual but continuously expanding…
Power Games
Another reason people are afraid of being vulnerable, one that I definitely feel, is the worry that someone will take advantage of knowing your fragility. This fear falls into a larger discussion of power. Postmodernism has really filtered through our society, and by and large, much of our educated elite view the balance of the world through a lens of power. Power dynamics can be frustrating when that logic permeates regular relationships. Vulnerability and connection can fall into strategy games. I see these games particularly pop up in the dating world, where people feel as though demonstrating care/love (certainly vulnerable experiences) "too early" or "too strongly" gives too much power to the recipient. I do think that discussions of power are important, especially because it can help winnow out whether someone is being authentic with their vulnerability and intentions, but again I think this fear of losing power exists on the same plane as fearing rejection & self-criticism. The intensity of pain varies on how much we accept our vulnerable parts.
Vanier however has a lot of interesting thoughts on power, so I pulled this quote:
“Relationship is never easy. Because some people you like, some people you like too much, some people you dislike. We are a people who have created barriers around our hearts. We are frightened of people because they touch something very deep within us. We want to prove always that we are right, that we are the best, the terrible reality of elitism. Because when we begin to meet each other, we can touch each other’s anguish, our difficulties, our need to possess, our need to control… To become human is to enter into a communion of hearts where you accept me just as I am and I accept you just as you are. I have no desire to have power over you. I don’t want to create a mutual dependency…As we begin to love each other, you give me life and I give you life. It is so difficult to describe because we are so used to either being above people or below people, aggressive or holding on, that the whole reality of communion of hearts is something difficult to touch.”
“People can be generous. Generosity can be a beautiful thing…But generosity can become power. ‘I am superior so I can give’. So generosity should flow into a meeting, where I meet you and I listen to you and you listen to me and we discover how precious we are. [Krista Tippet: And there is pain that emerges when a relationship takes place principally on a plane of power] … We often believe our identities are formed through power or through competence. The challenge is to create identity through meeting. It is not just meeting, but honoring what is weakest in the other. But that also means we are also honoring what is weakest in ourselves. To honor our own poverty, to admit to our own poverty. Weakness can be despised or weakness can be the cement of our body, our bonding. It’s because I am weak that I can say ‘I need you’, ‘I need your help, I need your love’. Weakness can be what bonds humanity together, our it can be what makes humans climb the ladder and crush others…Weakness is not gloating, Weakness is the recognition of who I am. (49:50-55:10)
This guy really is on another level of wisdom. He closes his discussion of power with a comparison between John the Baptist & Jesus. The former was the one who was powerful and charismatic. But, Jesus was quiet. He ate with prostitute, tax collectors, lepers. Jesus was disarmingly vulnerable. And, I think it is safe to say Jesus ‘power’ on society is still felt.
For more: Krista Tippet on Vanier and Tender Power
Jean Vanier’s soul left this Earth this past May, and I am thankful that I got to learn so much from him through just a sliver of his time. He stated that in his last years of life that his goal was to just become a friend of Jesus, meaning to become more vulnerable. I wonder how he felt in his last moments…
If you made it this far, thank you. This newsletter took longer than usual because I wanted it to give my thoughts on this topic serious interrogation and justice. I also want to play around different writing formats for this newsletter. Hopefully, this essay provoked some new thoughts. My thoughts on vulnerability and my own experience with my journey will continue to develop, so I hope to keep contributing to this convo.