Being Vulnerable to Vulnerability
Most of us humans are emotionally terrified creatures desperate for connection. One of my favorite pieces of writing on this fact is a short opinion blog from Tim Kreider in the New York Times Opinion section from 2013. “I Know What You Think of Me” is a rumination on anxiety in the modern world; specifically, it’s about the anxiety that comes with being seen, hearing about yourself from other people outside your own brain, and the near-universality of these feelings among humans. These observations were spawned, Kreider describes with humor, from being CC-ed on an email about him but not meant for him. A co-worker textually rolled their eyes at something Kreider decided to share, and it felt personal.
From there, Kreider claims emails like this en masse would unravel society, and that this is not a feature unique to the internet age but to human experience. We are all scared of being talked about yet crave attention; we fear what others might think of us yet think sometimes hapless things about others.
Of course, I found this piece because of a meme. The last independent clause of the last paragraph of “I Know What You Think of Me” became a meme on Tumblr in the late 2010s. Here is the paragraph in full, emphasis on the memed quote mine:
“Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
If you’re unfamiliar with how a text-based meme works, here’s what happened – that last sentence was ripped from original context, used to describe relationships between fictional characters, made into something humorous, reposted by teens and twenty-somethings who responded with a simple “oof.” When I first started seeing this quote everywhere, I had no idea it came from a longer piece. I found and read “I Know What You Think of Me” sometime in 2018, basically agreed with it, and moved on. I forgot about it.
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I did not forget about the heavily-memed quote from Kreider, however. It popped into my head one summer afternoon during my brief stint in therapy. I was talking about my longtime fears of doing – well, doing seemingly everything, from joining new clubs to talking about feelings with longtime friends to telling my parents more about myself. I deeply wanted to do these things yet tried and failed throughout life many times, swiftly backpedaling after the start. This of course led to the question of why I was so afraid. I sat on the therapist’s couch, bending the straw of my Dunkin’ iced coffee, and explained to her the Tim Kreider quote – with a brief interlude on Memes 101 – and that this conversation made me think of that “mortifying ordeal.”
My therapist recommended a TED talk by social worker and author Brené Brown called “The Power of Vulnerability.” I was skeptical of watching it because the idea of a 20-minute speech changing one’s perspective has always made my cynical self turn up my nose. I put off watching it for weeks and weeks. I went to several therapy sessions and had some good conversations, but that TED talk loomed in the background. My therapist would greet me by asking me if I’d watched it yet. Finally, partly out of a sense that I needed to do some homework to make progress and partly to get her off my back, I watched the Brown talk.
Within the first few minutes of “The Power of Vulnerability,” which was recorded in 2010, I felt my heart pound with recognition that this was, in fact, the hard truth I needed to hear. (Its 12 million views on YouTube suggest I’m not alone.)
In sum, Brown describes her research in which she collected stories from people about shame and fear. Surveying these stories, she figured out that the most “whole-hearted” people, those who live with less shame and fear, are people who have submitted to “excruciating vulnerability” in their lives, and allowed themselves to be fully “seen” by others. She describes her own total breakdown – or, spiritual awakening – at this discovery, as someone who hates being vulnerable, and her own adventure in therapy in order to become more vulnerable. She decided to delve deeper into the research in order to further deconstruct vulnerability and why it is so necessary for human connection.
By the end of the talk, I was having my own spiritual awakening, rendered almost catatonic by the irony of how I didn’t want to be vulnerable to a discussion about vulnerability, yet the root of my own personal problems was now laid bare in front of me: feeling deeply unworthy, as though there was something constitutionally shameful about myself, and therefore avoiding anything that exposed my inner self, which led to more feelings of ineptitude and prevented true connections. Rinse and repeat. The realization was a total mindfuck.
I also couldn’t help but think about the Kreider quote. I did some light googling, found “I Know What You Think of Me,” and read it a few times. “Vulnerability” is not mentioned once in the piece, yet it underpins Kreider’s observations. Being rejected, making fun of people, and recovery from various hurts and slights all involve one’s capacity for vulnerability. Navigating these things feels like being stripped bare, and to talk about them is also to be stripped bare, which leads to mountains of anxiety for many. Vulnerability leads to anxiety for those unpracticed in it, as it is excruciating, as Brown puts it; a “mortifying ordeal” as Kreider puts it.
By the end of my manic reading and note-taking, I realized this is not just a problem for me, personally, but a problem for many people like myself, who spend too much time on the internet and increasingly fall into sardonic aphorism rather than statements from the heart. Us teens and twenty-somethings of internet culture grasped onto the notion of wanting the rewards of being loved, the need to “submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known;” we plastered it all over our digital walls because we knew in our heart of hearts it was true. It’s a clever turn of phrase on Kreider’s part, the kind of bold vocabulary ripe for mass-sharing, that sticks around after its larger context dissipates. You can engage with it and what it could mean at a distance without finding its original context.
Herein lies the irony of the quote’s virality – to grapple with the mortifying reality of being vulnerable means not only allowing ourselves to be truly seen by others, but to dig deeper into our interiority as well. Without introspection – the real kind, not the self-loathing kind – we will never recognize why we feel unfulfilled. You would be hard-pressed to find a social media profile of a young person nowadays that doesn’t relish in sadness, wonder why they’re lonely even though they’re surrounded by people. Even beyond the extremely online demographic, our culture more broadly is steeped in superficiality over substance, ignoring problems until they go away. As Brown describes in her talk, we’d rather numb our feelings, traffic in anxiety and blame, and pretend than confront our inner selves, share these pieces of us, and be vulnerable. Anything but be vulnerable.
And so I returned to therapy feeling like the task of self-improvement was even greater than it was the last time I walked in the building. I, like Brown, had to wrap my hands around vulnerability and what it meant for me, how I could force myself to be more vulnerable. I was feeling grand, as I am prone; I was high on the expanse of big ideas, ranting about the task before me on the couch. My therapist brought me down to earth, quickly and calmly explaining there is no way to suddenly switch oneself into being one-hundred-percent vulnerable, to go from yearning and empty to enriched and full.
We developed a plan of attack – exercises in vulnerability would be an experiment for me. I must start small, my therapist reminded me, or else there was no way I wouldn’t be overwhelmed and quite possibly even more sullen. Engaging in little vulnerabilities, we decided, putting myself out there in small and varying ways, may help me reap some of those rewards Kreider references, the connection Brown describes.
I am not in therapy anymore, only because that shit costs money. I have no world-altering observations from my ongoing exercises in vulnerability. They are scary, excruciating, and mortifying ordeals that I conveniently forget to engage in often, just like I conveniently forgot to exercise my physical body today. This is, after all, an ongoing journey.
I have challenged myself to be more vulnerable in these small ways that, when added up, are in fact quite big. The times I have submitted to that mortifying ordeal of being known in the past six months have been terrifying to push through. There is no getting around that.
But I can report, with certainty, that the rewards are as fulfilling as the experts (and memes) say.
elise writes way less than she wants to on this substack. she is a grumpy yet optimistic English BA holder waiting on graduate school acceptance letters, where she’ll be studying rhetoric, digital society, and media. her twitter is here and filled with embarrassing content.