Vulnerability
Why I sometimes sound crazy
“Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” - Job 1:21 NIV
Disclaimer: Before you carry on, I’m writing this piece for largely selfish reasons: to break my cycle of inactivity with this newsletter, explain why I haven’t posted in a while, and hopefully kickstart a new cycle in which I’ll post more frequently.
This is a strange post, and will hopefully cut through a lot of what I’ve been feeling and thinking about lately. It will also (as usual) explain why I haven’t posted in a while.
I owe this post in part to a friend with whom I recently had a conversation. It’s one of the strange things about sharing your own intellectual and spiritual growth - with another person, or publicly. Receiving even the tiniest bit of critical feedback can serve to make the whole enterprise of sharing feel silly, or worse, shut us down entirely. Often, friends, family, and other well-wishers simply mean well for us: they’re naturally invested in our success, and mean to protect us from the elements. Sharing your work publicly is a double-edged sword (a paradox at the heart of a platform like Twitter). If it resonates, the resonance creates a virtuous loop that further leads on to synchronicities, such as having like-minded people discovering your work and that leading on to connections with them, and so on. On the other hand, there’s a kind of feedback that tends to ring hollow: the validation of often empty metrics (likes, retweets, shares) and criticism that often is simply a projection of another person’s stuff on to your work. I’ve often found when I post a piece of content, I immediately get hung up on the feedback - constantly checking to see how many likes or views a post has received. This continues, often to the detriment of actually sitting down and getting my next piece of work out. It hurts my consistency. This is definitely something I need to work on, and my having consciously verbalised this in this post will probably help me going forward.
Which brings me back to the conversation I had with said friend.
Those of who you have followed me for a while will have observed a bit of a change in the way I communicate publicly, particularly on Twitter.
Some of my tweets, for example, may come across as being a degree of unhinged (slight, or extreme, I’ll leave you to decide. Perhaps I’m still oscillating, finding my equilibrium). This is in large part because I no longer have an organisational muzzle or a professional reason to speak or come across a certain way. I previously had to watch what I said publicly - for reasons obvious and non-obvious - for the better part of 5 years. I even went to the extent of deleting older pieces of writing I’d put out on the Internet to maintain the veneer of “objectivity”. But besides a change of job, I’ve also been on a psychologically inward journey over the past few years, reckoning with my mental health, spiritual growth, and giving them both the attention they deserve (material for another post, which I promise will eventually come). The bottom line is that I’ve embraced a greater degree of vulnerability.
This has not gone unnoticed. My friend (who shall remain unnamed) observed my said vulnerability and compared the tone of my writing to the likes of a couple of self-help gurus. He himself acknowledged that embracing vulnerability led to a greater degree of reception or validation of the art he himself produced. Curiously, he said he’d like to start projecting a more declarative self on social media, rather than lay himself open to debate. If he does choose to engage with anyone, he said, it would be if they’re important enough or if he’s highlighting work he particularly admires. Fair enough.
But I did some thinking about what he said. Firstly, I don’t believe I sound like a self-help/productivity guru and that is hardly my intention. I don’t believe in projecting shrill certainty for the sake of garnering followers, although I will readily acknowledge that Twitter’s design and usage probably make me as guilty of this as anyone else. The kind of tone I’m looking to avoid is characteristic of the broken information ecology we live in today: one where zero-sum debate is favoured over generative dialogue, and where nearly every issue that should be discussed with nuance degenerates into crude binaries.
I don’t pretend to know it all. What I write online these days is more like notes to myself, a breadcrumb trail for me to trace my growth and learning in real-time. It’s also an archive of my thought so I can come back to it and examine it when needed. I believe that by being honest and sharing your own journey, you open yourself up to, and attract other people on a similar journey and path as yours. You find resonance. You open channels for constructive dialogue. You compare notes. You share your learnings. You take on a mentality that seeks to incorporate the best ideas into a broader tapestry, rather than reject your favourite guru wholesale when they make an inevitable blunder. Vulnerability is a crucial part of how we get there: only by admitting that we do not know, can we learn. Only by acknowledging that we are weak, can we grow strong. And frankly, for me, being vulnerable comes down to our plain old fragility as mortal beings. We’re here today, gone tomorrow. That fact behooves a bit of humility.
Some confuse vulnerability for weakness. Vulnerability is about honesty and authenticity. That is why I newsletter what I newsletter, tweet what I tweet, blog what I blog (however imperfectly, or inconsistently) and still keep going. It’s about showing up whenever I can and being honest about the challenges I face. My hope and sense is that some of you will relate. But even if none of you do, I’ve gotten this off my chest and hopefully am helping free myself from a validation/criticism loop. And now, having articulated the specific blocks I encounter while trying to do something consistently, I think I’ll be able to do better on this newsletter going forward.
I can’t end this without something for you take away.
Here’s a beautiful extract on vulnerability from the poet David Whyte’s book, Consolations (audio version here):
“Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.”
“To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability” — how we inhabit our vulnerability — “how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”
Thanks for reading!
Ritvik