Your Vulnerability Is Your Truth
Vulnerability is often perceived as weakness, which is why we tend to hide those parts of ourselves. We fear that others might not be sensitive to our vulnerable areas and could end up hurting us — or worse, mocking us for being open about them. When someone has been bullied excessively, whether verbally or physically, they begin to hate their vulnerable side. They start believing that if they hadn’t been vulnerable or different from others, they wouldn’t have been targeted.
But vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s not strength either. It’s simply the side of you that is raw and unapologetically authentic — which means your vulnerability represents your most honest self. When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we’re actually being honest with someone in the rarest of ways. Problems arise when we start measuring this authentic side against what society deems appropriate.
Consider a young boy at school being mocked for his poverty. That’s his vulnerability, and he begins to hate being poor — yet poverty is also part of his most honest reality. The more people mock his vulnerability, the more he tries to hide it. What starts as concealing his financial situation by putting on a facade eventually escalates into poor financial habits as he grows older. He begins buying things he doesn’t need simply so people won’t see him as that same poor child. To appear wealthy, he might resort to actions he wouldn’t normally approve of.
The only way to break this cycle is by acknowledging that you were vulnerable and weren’t treated as you deserved. You can choose to hate the world or those people, or you can choose to love your authentic self and grow from there. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate your vulnerabilities — it should be to let them expand into other areas of your life, because vulnerability is the closest we come to true honesty.