What is Vulnerability?

Edited by: Mythili Kamath 

You feel your blood rush in the opposite direction, you feel like throwing up and collapsing into nothingness and you feel  your facial features drip into each other. You feel your organs become one stable state, no distinction among them, and there is nothing that makes you feel like yourself. 

Yes. You were just vulnerable to someone for the first time.

What is vulnerability, really? Well, the Oxford Dictionary puts it as “the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.” 

Welp. 

It is essentially you exposing yourself, opening yourself up to harm. However, true vulnerability lies in knowing that you won’t. Knowing that you will be taken care of. You are vulnerable when you know that the possibility of care is greater than the possibility of harm – the benefits outweigh the risk. Maybe that is why being vulnerable is so, so tough, and gut wrenching for some people. The possibility of care does not occur to them, or its probability of occurrence seems discouraging. 

Maybe the expectation of hurt comes as a ‘default setting’, induced by deep conditioning, or maybe it comes from experience. 

Experience, you ask, how can it deter a person from such a fundamentally humane need for vulnerability? I’ll tell you. 

Your hands are calloused. Your fingertips are red and cement cakes your palms. You’re sweating, your forehead shines. You work hard, so hard, to put that wall up. It’s airtight in the corners, nothing can escape. No noise that you make can be heard on the other side, no noise that is made on the other side can be heard by you. 

You interact  with people just for the sake of communication, just barely to convince yourself that you exist in a space with other people. Communication is very, very different from talking. You have only ever given a descriptive account of your emotions, never an emotional account. You have taken others’ vulnerability like water takes oil. Like if someone poured frigid water on your hands, but you didn’t feel it cold. You hear but you don’t listen, you speak things you don’t mean, you give a shoulder to rest on but no comfort. 

So much effort into building a wall. Not even a fraction of that effort to ruin it. Within that airtight wall, a hole festers. You hear whispers from the outside. They seem to be having fun. You look through it and people can hear you move behind the wall. They talk to you. You talk back, just a little bit, a harmless amount. You hear them respond. 

You scream. So they will hear. So they continue to respond. 

You gulp it, not the communication but the talking. You press your ear against the wall so, so desperately. You break the wall you constructed with your own hands. The callous, hurt, useless wall, safety behind the wall, isolation behind it; you are confused, you don’t know what to do, desperate, alone , isolated? Solitude? What do you want? What is your fate? 

You ask. Again. No answer. 

So you break it down. You let it crumble. Now what? 

You’re panting and exhausted. What can you even do? Except let other people take you? You wait. Will they come? 

Yes? 

No? 

Please? 

You’re exposed now. Prone to harm now. Waiting for someone to care now. You stand here now. And wait.

But no one comes. All the voices you hear, gone. Were they just a hoax? A creation of your mind? You collapse into a chasm, you’re sucked into this vacuum of silence. 

What good was that wall when you are alone anyway?  

Experience. Understanding. Knowing. What do you even do with this knowledge? It won’t do you any good anymore. 

You are exhausted. So you lie down on the cold hard ground. Belly up. Your face and neck are caked with grit. You ask yourself– what use was that? 

I still haven’t answered this question. 

So I sit there, in my sweat and blood, waiting for something to ignite within me, something to catch fire. 

For something to burn. 

• #emotions
• #feelings
• #self
• mental health
• wellbeing