Vulnerability

Vulnerable is a hard word for me to spit out. In fact, spitting is a pretty accurate description.

It always has a tinge of nakedness. Of bare skin and stretch marks. Once you reveal your vulnerabilities to someone, you can never take them back again. And that’s a terrifying thing.

Vulnerability is fragile. Vulnerability is you giving a delicate flower of truth to someone and hoping they don’t trample on it. So why ever be vulnerable if we run such a risk?

The importance of being vulnerable with other people is this: If you have a garden of beautiful flowers- would you keep it to yourself? Or would you expose people you trust to it so that it can influence them, change them, even inspire them?

Without vulnerability we run the risk of having a beautiful garden but being totally alone. And maybe your garden has some thorns and some pests and some torn up plants-they all do from time to time. But vulnerability not only invites someone else to see your garden but to work on it.

To bring healthy plants from their own garden and to let them take root in yours. To fertilize what needs to be fed, and to remove the weeds that are in the way. This process of growing and removing and fine-tuning cultivates both the garden and the gardener. Most importantly, it cultivates unity. And relationship. And connection.

Some people fill their garden with plastic flamingos and fake succulents to give the appearance of “having it all together” and to avoid having to share it with anyone. Others have a secret garden (pre-transformation) that has been neglected for too long. Maybe a disaster came along at some point and eventually they found it impossible to begin again. And maybe those people with the fake plants and animals really do have something beautiful to share- but it makes them different.

Vulnerabilities to me are like the stretchmarks of the persona. They often exist from something painful to be a reminder of the past as well as the future. We all start as a relatively blank physical and mental canvas and are shaped by what we experience. Without sharing our vulnerabilities we become a filtered highlight reel of a person that is hard to find connection with. (Think for a second about a movie in which only good things happen for a whole 2 hours. How incredibly unsatisfying would that be?)

We all have our own version of stretchmarks. And none of us “has it together.” So we might as well learn to connect with other flawed people because we are all in the same journey together.

And all of our gardens could use some tending.