Vulnerability is no easy feat. Our social realities and marginalizations make it hard. How much vulnerability to offer is a complicated decision that depends on our feelings of safety, survival, trust, and belonging.
Our deepest human need is to be seen and valued by other people. We’re told that the secret to happiness is to be our authentic selves, to show up. Of course, it’s not that simple. Show yourself and you may get rejected. As we have seen, it’s easier to show your authentic self when the world tells a story that values that self. Presenting an authentic self is safer for people with privileged identities and personal histories of love and support. There are valid reasons to hide our full and authentic selves, including the reality that expressing them may put us at risk. Think of all the trans women who have been killed for being themselves, or men ridiculed for expressing fear. Our shame about certain characteristics may also hold us back, much of which may be the result of internalized oppression. Hiding aspects of ourselves is often intended as self-protection.
If your coworker doesn’t share much about their personal life, maybe there’s stigma associated with what goes on behind the scenes. They may not expect the luxury of being met with understanding and respect when they share personally. So don’t rush to judgment when you see someone self-protecting—and that includes if that someone is you.
This poses a challenge: if we don’t show ourselves, how can people get to know us or accept us? Not revealing ourselves leaves us isolated. Any “acceptance” we may get feels hollow and undeserved. Unless I open myself to being hurt, I am closing myself off to being loved and connected. It is also harder to love ourselves if we don’t feel love reflected back from others.
In this chapter we’ll look at the question of how to find the sweet spot between protecting oneself and showing up fully, in order to experience love and belonging.
When you show up completely and reveal your authentic self, you run the risk of rejection: nasty looks, social rejection, job loss, physical violence, or worse. It makes sense to want to hide aspects of ourselves that we think will prevent our acceptance, whether they are traits we dislike ourselves or traits we know to be stigmatized or judged harshly by others. We want to put forward our most likable self. I went to a party recently where I was really on. I felt witty and smart, like I knew how to play the game socially. Then I came home and felt crappy. I had performed friendliness and bonding, rather than really connecting with anyone. I was acting not as myself but as the person I thought they wanted me to be. Acting inauthentically is such a lonely feeling. This inauthentic presentation of ourselves results from being policed all our lives and taught which traits are valued and which aren’t.
Of course, this is nuanced, as there are no objective standards to what traits get valued across social identities or locations or time. Boys don’t cry, right? And while a tearful girl may be supported by her girlfriends, her crying will hold her back in a corporate setting. Even this line of thinking must be fleshed out further. Lawyer, scholar, and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to help explain the oppression of Black women and show how multiple oppressions intersect to form our experience.1
As Crenshaw describes, the intersectional experience needs to be taken into account as its influence is different than the sum of its parts. While boys can’t cry and girls can’t cry in corporate settings, the reasoning behind these things differs depending on race. Black boys don’t cry, for example, not just because it threatens their masculinity, but also because they are often taught they can’t cry if they want to be valued or seen as credible. And while girls can’t cry in corporate settings because they won’t be respected, Black girls can’t cry because they also face the “Angry Black Woman” trope—forever seen as women who are unable to “control” their emotions.
When you analyze a situation from an intersectional perspective, it becomes clear that generalizations about groups are likely describing dominant group experience and misrepresenting those with multiple levels of marginalization. Sojourner Truth, an African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist, explained this in her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?,” bringing attention to ways in which the feminist movement served white women and didn’t speak to her experience as a Black woman.
Additionally, the tropes associated with Black people inherently force them into binary gender boxes. Even in addressing Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, we must remember that gender is more complicated than woman and man. Sojourner Truth’s demand for inclusion in a narrative of gender and safety was also an acknowledgment of the failure of gender defined and limited by whiteness. This, too, complicates vulnerability, race, and gender. When Black people are already seen through the lens of failure based on standards of whiteness that are embedded as systemic ideologies, this automatically limits the access Black people have to authenticity, performance, and embodiment.
Vulnerability is crucial in friendships, and this section unpacks the vulnerability required in sharing ourselves with friends. I write with an awareness that I don’t navigate this area as well as I’d like.
My tendency is to offer up too much vulnerability and then to feel too exposed—what’s been called a vulnerability hangover. Seeing others fall into their patterns of oversharing of vulnerability helps me understand mine better. For example, I remember when a friend and I went to dinner with two new acquaintances. My friend told an intimate story of childhood trauma. When she had originally told this story to me privately, there was trust and intimacy, and I could empathize. It helped us bond. I related to the innocent and vulnerable child she was, how painful the experience was, how it shaped who she is today. Sharing the story with me helped her manage the pain, knowing that I didn’t blame her or see it as shameful, and that I thought she didn’t deserve to be treated that way.
When she retold the story in this new context, however, it was met with an awkward silence. Our companions couldn’t engage. They couldn’t give her the emotional support she needed in telling that story. It’s not that they were incapable of empathy, but rather that the context wasn’t appropriate for this deep dive.
I watched this happen and could feel how hard it was for her to reveal herself to this degree and not meet with the empathy and support she needed. She lacked the social skills to see it was, in this setting, an overshare. She left feeling hurt and ashamed; she had revealed a tender part of herself and the tenderness wasn’t supported.
Her sharing and vulnerability, rather than offering the intimacy she was after, had come across as a burden, an expectation. I realize I often make the same mistake. I want to get better about boundaries and learn the limits of vulnerable sharing. Rather than give my vulnerability lightly, I need to save it, and offer it in places where it can be honored.
“Using vulnerability is not the same as being vulnerable; it’s the opposite—it’s armor,” writes researcher and author Brené Brown. Brown describes oversharing like my friend’s as “floodlighting”—treating vulnerability as a tool to elicit validation. “When we use vulnerability to floodlight our listener, the response is disconnection,” says Brown in her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Closely linked, she says, is the “smash and grab,” in which you “smash through people’s social boundaries with intimate information, then grab whatever attention and energy you can get your hands on.”2
I understand this in theory even if I’m not so good at navigating it. In order to determine when to share or not share, we need to reflect on our expectations and know what reaction we’re looking for. If I use my vulnerability to try to reach intimacy, that’s unfair to the other person. It’s manipulative and usually backfires.
My need to reach out and talk about what’s going on in my life can be intense. That makes me vulnerable to dumping it on people with whom I haven’t developed the kind of relationship that can absorb that information. Then I feel like crap after, a vulnerability hangover.
I understood this all too well when I was on the other side of the floodlighting equation with a new acquaintance. It was our first time alone socially. It was evident she was nervous and wanted me to like her. I asked a simple question about her background, and this triggered a lengthy description of her abusive childhood. I could tell it was a well-practiced story.
Listening to it overwhelmed me. I didn’t want to hear it and didn’t want the responsibility of tending to her and providing the empathetic response the story called for. She was trying to fast-track us into being good friends and I wasn’t ready. I felt used.
She was also disconnected from the emotion of the story as she was telling it, which felt to me as if it wasn’t coming from her heart, in the moment. Vulnerability isn’t just about sharing pat or rehearsed personal stories. It’s about rawness. We can often sense when people aren’t being authentic in the moment. It gets in the way of connection if we can’t feel others’ presence.
As much as I felt used by this new acquaintance, I could relate to her. I don’t want to dump on others, yet I do. It’s so hard for me to be alone with my loneliness. I want more intimacy. So I let loose, hoping that will cut some of the pain. I have compassion for why she may have poured out her story like that, and for the likelihood that she’s hurt that I haven’t followed up to spend more time with her.
It’s helpful to see how icky it is to be on the receiving end of this kind of false or unwarranted sharing. Rather than achieve the intended goal of furthering intimacy, it blocked it. Seeing the imbalance in action helped me calibrate for myself what level of sharing is appropriate, and learn to check myself to consider the setting before dumping intimate information.
I wish I had magic glasses to show me only the right people, and a magic wristwatch to alert me to the right times to share, but I don’t. I’m learning and getting better at it, though, recognizing that if my goal is to create intimacy, it’s not the case that I must offer vulnerable information that’s going to put the other person in the position of taking care of me, but rather that I need to be present in the moment, not jumping to the stories I’ve created about my life. It’s also about fine-tuning my understandings of social cues that may help me figure out how much is enough or too much. I’m learning to be patient and to build trust first, to brave the discomfort of getting to know people. I’m also listening to my gut to realize when I am not suited to be friends with someone.
I’ve come to recognize that I require a lot more depth in order to feel safe and connected than most people. It’s more common for people to need to build a stronger foundation of trust before reaching that depth. It’s a tricky situation: what I need for safety is precisely what makes many others feel unsafe. I’m learning now to watch for different intimacy styles, and to know that I need people who are less protected, not to chase people to make them more giving. We all have different personal boundaries and comfort levels, so what feels appropriate to one person might not to another. I like to dive straight into the deep stuff while other people may take a while to warm up before sharing more personal information. Neither of these approaches is better or worse than the other, but I get in trouble when I try to mold someone into being more like me or to make them adapt to my style of intimacy in place of their own. It’s about accepting people for what they are giving me, and not pushing them to be someone different and go out of their comfort zone.
Related to this, I had a troubling relationship with an old friend where I always felt that I wasn’t getting enough from her, and it didn’t feel safe to have told her as much about myself as I did. Our pattern was that her holding back triggered me to offer more in hopes it would build intimacy, when in fact it did the opposite. I also resented that she didn’t share more details about what she was going through, and it was particularly painful when I heard about things, like her partner’s illness, from other people. I didn’t notice what was going on until we got too entrenched in that uncomfortable pattern and it felt really crappy. Had I given credence to these feelings earlier on, I could have stepped back and realized we weren’t right for one another before it got so painful. Pay attention to gut feelings; there’s a lot to learn!
I’ve got some other tips for other oversharers out there. I’ve learned it’s better for me to offer my stories when they’re asked for than to offer them unsolicited. I have also learned to let others set the intimacy level first and then respond reciprocally.
To figure out where my boundaries are most comfortable, I pay more attention to my feelings in the moment. If I share this, what will I need to get back in response? What’s the risk that I won’t get it? Do I want to risk it? If the person is uncomfortable with what I share, I’ve crossed that line. I continue to make mistakes, but over time I’m getting better at being able to see where that line is and what works best for me. I pay attention to the past to help me learn.
I also know that there are certain things that I’m more likely to regret sharing with people, so I can protect those particular topics, at least until significant trust is built. Before I tell a secret, I imagine what it would be like to have that secret out.
When I came up against writer’s block with this book, I asked people in my community to come to an experimental event. My words flow when I’m on stage before an audience, so I asked them to hear me out. My vision was to let loose a stream of consciousness on the material I was struggling with at the keyboard and record the results. I would be speaking off the cuff, I warned, so please come only if you can deal with things going very wrong.
I posted the invitation and then had a meltdown. I should cancel. How could I embarrass myself like this? Reveal my inadequacy? I’m a known public speaker. A published writer. I want a reputation for saying important, transformative stuff. This is part of what makes me feel valued. But my authentic self is hardly so articulate. Particularly when not rehearsed, I spill out things that are wrong or incomplete. I stumble or take too long to get to the point.
I was writing a book about belonging and yet I was afraid I would no longer belong, panicked at the idea of showing my authentic self.
The invitation was already out in the ether, so I forced myself to go through with my plan. During the event, I bounced back and forth between feeling great at times, and inadequate at others. Was I delivering? Afterwards I had one of those intense and painful vulnerability hangovers I described previously, feeling sure that everyone now knew I wasn’t the person reflected in my public persona, that I was a sham. I still haven’t entirely recovered, to be honest, and quail a little when I run into people who attended. Yet here you are, reading the book I needed to get out of me, so it was obviously a worthwhile gamble.
I need to remember that connection and belonging are irreducible needs of being human. Without them, I suffer. Having them requires opening myself up. If I’m unwilling to risk vulnerability, to risk getting hurt sometimes or showing my inadequacy, I am doomed to feel unfulfilled. If the risk is necessary, so is the need to learn to deal with it. If I need to let it all out on a dais to find the words for my book, I’m going to have to learn to accept that I may not always be as articulate as I’d like.
It comes down to cultivating a sense of worthiness. If I feel unworthy, I’m more likely to protect myself, to hunker down and avoid emotional risk. Alternatively, if I accept my imperfections—remembering that I’m worthy of love and belonging no matter how messed up I am—then I feel worthy, and therefore can dare to put myself out there, to trade vulnerability for the intimacy that will sustain me. That requires self-compassion, being kind to myself and recognizing that I’ve messed up at times, not because I am a bad person, but I was doing the best I could, trying to survive with the tools I had. It also requires that I recognize that I’m imperfect—and that that’s okay.
I have to be willing to let go of not being who I think I’m supposed to be and just accept who I actually am. What makes me vulnerable is what makes me beautiful.
Conventional social attitudes cast vulnerability as weakness. Prominent thought leaders like Brené Brown have challenged that, instead viewing vulnerability as desirable and encouraging us to take off our armor and express who we are. Please know that it is vital to approach this kind of undertaking with nuance. Vulnerability is more safely accessible for privileged people whose traits are valued by our society. For those with marginalized identities, showing ourselves may not always be safe. If I had declared myself trans as a kid in suburban New Jersey, I would have risked social exclusion and bullying at the very least. Some trans kids—particularly those with other marginalized identities—risk far worse violence when their identities are known or suspected.
As another example, coming out as undocumented is an incredibly vulnerable act, and one that can end with functional incarceration (detention), deportation, and possibly physical violence or death. Or for Native people, the vulnerability of sharing their culture and resources led to genocide, as discussed earlier—this history has been wired into their bodies through historical trauma. It’s no wonder that some descendants of Indigenous settlers self-protect.
Marginalized people need to learn skills for managing stigma and determining how to self-reveal so we can be seen while maintaining the degree of safety we need. (As we will discuss later on, some helpful skills for stigma management include reminding yourself that the problem is in the culture, not you, and finding community.) One way this self-protection can manifest is in the tendency to stay within a known community of people with similar experiences, which makes it more challenging for all of us to get to know people who don’t share our identities.
How do we offer up our vulnerability? When is it valuable to armor up?
The first thing to remember is that fear of vulnerability is universal. It’s just our human nervous system registering a natural protective reaction. We are not alone. Everyone has been wounded and feels a need to self-protect. If we allow our fears to rule us and keep ourselves hidden, however, we never have the opportunity to see that we can be loved.
Our defenses, while they make sense at some stages, become a habit and then aren’t so useful. We have to keep reexamining them. Yes, we instinctively want to protect ourselves, but then we begin to see that being “defended”—building an emotional moat and walling ourselves up inside—also isn’t safe. It’s a “false refuge,” as described by psychologist, author, and meditation instructor Tara Brach.3 The moat gives us a temporary sense of safety but also keeps us from connection, which we need to feel fulfilled. By blocking out vulnerability, we also block out joy and happiness.
The key is to meet our vulnerability with kindness and compassion. We notice what is hard for us, we let it be there, and we offer kindness. Our inner experience exists, whether we like it or not, so we make room for it, with kindness and gentleness.
Start recognizing your habitual ways of moving away from vulnerability. Do you fall into depression? Blame? Anger? What are you accustomed to doing to get approval? What are the personas you put on, the ways you strive to be seen in the world?
As I mentioned earlier, I like to be seen as smart, and that puts pressure on me to perform. I feel the need to practice what I’m going to say so I always sound articulate. I do that because I don’t want to embarrass myself and not look good. I’m afraid of other people seeing that I’m flawed and inadequate. That’s my conditioning. The way around this is to make friends with my vulnerability, seeing it as the stuff that makes me human and connects me with others. Hiding what I perceive as my inadequacies is what will separate me from others and make me unrelatable. The tendency to want to hide it, on the other hand, is universal for humans and can bond me with others.
The more wounding we have, the stronger the armor. That armor helped us survive in the past. (For me, being “smart” bought parental approval.) When I bring gentleness and kindness to my wounding, I can soothe it. Hiding it, on the other hand, gives me no opportunity to be free.
We need to feel that others accept us and love us; indeed, to the extent that we don’t, our survival is threatened. The more we feel we deviate from the standards of our culture, the more challenging this can be, so we need to make space for that. We live with this undercurrent in us that something’s wrong with us, paired with the fear it will be discovered. If we accept our perceived “wrongness” and give ourselves love and compassion, then we no longer need to fear being “found out.”
Your genius is in your uniqueness. The injustice resides in the American Dream, which tells us that anyone can make it to the top, given enough determination, savvy, and grit, when in reality, we aren’t all starting from the same place, the same “bottom,” on our way up. Some of us have been pushed to the basement and have boulders placed in our way, so our inability to get ahead is translated as personal failure when it’s really the fault of context. When we buy into that myth, we blame ourselves when we can’t live our dreams. We feel shame and lock up those parts of ourselves that are denied value and respect in an effort to be less vulnerable.
But it’s those very traits that are needed—your unique experience and culture, the stuff that makes you you.
I want you to know, you are the gift the world needs. You may not always—or ever—feel that’s true. But try it on, because if you don’t offer yourself up, we all lose out. We need what you have to contribute. That feeling of not-enoughness? That’s not your failing. That’s human! Feeling vulnerable, imperfect, and afraid is human. Naming it allows others to connect with you. We share our imperfectness. One of the most beautiful things we can offer to others is to hold space for these struggles that we all go through.
Vulnerability is about allowing people to see us, as we are, in all our human messiness. It’s the key to connection. We all deserve to know that our lives have value, that what we have to offer the world is useful, and that the people around us value and appreciate us beyond our surface. When we protect ourselves and don’t show our vulnerability, we cut ourselves off from love, intimacy, and connection. They come to us through the same door.
While it is the key to connection, communion, and community, vulnerability heals only when there’s a certain degree of safety. Some people may abuse it. We will get hurt sometimes. Relationship pain is an unavoidable aspect of being human. But when we can see this for what it is—perhaps the sign of a mismatch between two people—we can use our pain as a learning opportunity to help us make better choices in the future. The fear of rejection supports us in identifying the people who can best respect and appreciate us.
Providing safe space for someone else to be vulnerable is a tremendous gift to bestow, a gift from which the giver benefits greatly. It is a life-affirming experience to have someone offer you their vulnerability, to know that you have done enough for them to trust you with something so intimate. We should all be able to experience this.
When trust is building and vulnerability is being met and returned with a mutual gift of revelation and intimacy, that is where transformation, healing, and connection emerge. When the space between us is curious, brave, and safe, a new world is born. The key to healing—for ourselves and the world!—is the willingness to be (wisely, carefully) vulnerable and to connect with each other and create ways to make it safe for people to enter into that experience with us.
Embracing your own vulnerability is hard, but not nearly as hard as giving up on connection and belonging. Choose vulnerability—but choose it wisely. It is important to protect yourself without closing yourself off. Learning to navigate vulnerability carefully is paramount because vulnerability is the seed of connection. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, connection can bolster us when we come up against hard times and oppression; it is the precursor and process by which we create a much better world.