The Courage to be Vulnerable

I am the keeper of many secrets. One of the ways I experience the world is that people have often told me things that were hard to say, or hard for them to feel. In my younger days, I often had the experience of schizophrenics rambling on the bus, beginning to talk to me as I listened and over the course of the time going from ranting about the cameras watching them, to talking directly to me in a comprehensible way, and making the kind of small, human connection that people make on public transit. I love the transient friendship of a line outside the ladies’ room in a crowded bar. I’m a good listener.

At Cottage, our connections usually run much deeper, once we let them. Over the years, I have held a lot of parents who couldn’t yet tell me what was happening for them, but they just looked like they needed a hug, so I asked. I have stood at the kitchen sink beside a mother crying because her child was hitting everyone in the class and it was so scary and stressful for her to be the parent of someone who was having such a hard time. I have leaned on the fence listening to the pain of fertility struggles. I have sat in my office with sleep-deprived parents who just couldn’t stand to keep going without some other adult to hold space for just how much parenting asks of us, even without anything special going on. I have had each of these conversations many times. Somehow people always seem to think they are the only ones going through that hard thing. 

It’s the holiday time as I write this, and I am finding so much exhaustion in the faces of parents around me right now. We have all of our regular amount of unachievable goals, like a clean house and getting our kids to sleep at night, and then we compound it with the pressures of making our family’s experience of holidays somehow magical, and we can’t figure out how we are supposed to have time to do this, much less where we are supposed to find the brainpower.

And then a bunch of us are walking around with worries so big, it’s hard to figure out how to talk about them. Our marriage falling apart. Our womb refusing to carry another baby to term. Our child struggling and no easy answer of how to help them. Our parents aging and needing us to care for them. All of this on top of the weight of late-stage capitalism, and the threat of totalitarianism, and the wars and guns outside, and systemic injustice, and whatever else is just in the air we breathe. It’s too much. 

Last night at a zoom meeting with members of our Board, before any of us said anything, there was a moment of, this is exhausting. This is just exhausting. None of us had to specify what, it just is. And somebody said to me, “Teacher Jocelyn, how do you do it?”, as if I am doing more than any of you, who have preschool aged children, and probably haven’t slept a full  night in 4 years. This person speaking has two children and a job, and a pretty serious volunteer commitment here, so I mean, how do I do it? How do YOU do it?! But I just threw up my hands, and chuckled, and said, “I cry in my car!” 

I do a lot of my best self-regulation in my car. That’s where I often am when I finally notice my jaw clenched, or my shoulders tensed up. The rest of the time, I just keep going, no matter how much my pants are too tight or whatever else might be bugging me, but in my car, with my tunes on, I finally notice my body a little. Drop my shoulders. Take a deep breath. Move my neck. And then I can start to finally hear all the stuff that wakes me up at night, but in the daytime when maybe I can actually do something about it. I guess it’s part of interoception–it’s something I’m working on at therapy, noticing myself and my own feelings. The way I used to do it was pretend not to have feelings, and it was not that great. 

Pretending not to have feelings is a barrier to connection, and connection is maybe the entire point of being a person. 

I spent a lot of years pretending not to have feelings, or minimizing the feelings I could admit to having, because it’s so daunting to be vulnerable and share those things with people. It’s so hard for me to trust that another person will hold space for me. I always seem to think I will just come off as annoying. Is it some kind of vestige of my English ancestry that we just do our level best to keep our chin up and carry on? I don’t know. I kept my chin up through a lot of stuff that was breaking me apart inside, all by myself, because I didn’t know how I could talk about it. 

But I know that here, at least, I can find people who will see me, and can sit there watching me cry, and not feel the need to fix anything, because there’s nothing to fix. I can find people who know my story–or anyway the parts I feel ready to tell– and still like me. Or maybe more to the point, your knowing me and knowing my stories helps me feel connected to you. And that’s how it always works, isn’t it? Without the courage to be vulnerable with each other, there’s no room for compassion and for connection, which is the best part of being human. 

A fellow parent I have known for some years was walking beside me a moment when she suddenly said, “Hey– your face.” And gestured that she could see I was holding something inside. I nodded, and asked her for a hug. And we just stood there with our arms around each other, being human together.