The V Word
...and why vulnerability is so hard and so necessary.
Here’s the truth: most of us are not afraid of vulnerability. We’re afraid of what happens after.
This year, I started a podcast with my partner, and it was—and continues to be—very much outside of my comfort zone. Like, in a different time zone. I’m a writer. I’m used to being precise about what I put on the page before I send it out into the world.
A podcast doesn’t work like that. No, no no. It’s real time. It’s unedited. It’s conversation as it unfolds. And to make it even more vulnerable, I’m in conversation with someone I love. Someone I trust deeply. Someone I don’t ever hold back from. So to carry that energy (the one we’ve built privately) into a room with a microphone feels like a different kind of exposure. A much deeper risk. One I’m still learning how to sit with.
I’m no stranger to the opinions of strangers. People I don’t know have weighed in on my life for most of my life, and I’ve learned how to tune that out. I turn instead toward my circle (my very small, very close circle) for the harder things. Because I know those people will hold me in whatever form I show up. But this idea of vulnerability as it shape shifts has me asking a question I keep coming back to: how do I show up with that same level of openness in every space? And is that even the goal?
The word vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnerare—to wound. To be vulnerable is to be open to wounding. Not physically, which might actually be preferable sometimes, but in the quieter, more familiar ways: being misunderstood, dismissed, exposed, betrayed.
Vulnerability is saying something true without knowing how it will be received—or if it will be held with the care it deserves. And so yeah, I believe most of us don’t fear saying the thing. We fear what happens after we’ve said it.
Maybe this scene feels familiar: you’ve shared something real (perhaps a little too real) and watched it get thrown back at you months later in an argument, or held over your head for years and years quietly threatened as something that could be used against you if needed. Maybe you’ve heard your private words repeated in rooms you were never in. Maybe you’ve offered something tender, still forming, and felt the immediate urge to pull it back inside when it wasn’t understood. For many of us, safety has come to mean silence.
So we don’t stop being honest, not necessarily. We become more selective with our honesty. We tell the story, but not the whole story. We offer the version that has already been processed—the one that feels easier to receive. We leave out the part that still aches, the part we don’t fully understand yet, the part that could be misread if it reached the wrong person.
We become fluent in almost-truth. It protects us, or at least it feels like it does. But it also creates distance from other people, from intimacy, even from ourselves. There’s a difference between being understood and being known. That is a lesson I took 40 years to learn.
And for those of us who write, who create, who make something out of what we’ve lived, that line is even more delicate. We don’t just feel things—we shape them. We take what is internal and invisible and give it language. We pin it to the page. And then, whether we admit it or not, we wait. We look for cues. Did it land? Did I say too much? Did they understand what I meant? Sometimes that kind of truth-telling opens something intimate, something innately human. Sometimes it’s matched from the other side. And sometimes it’s not.
When it’s not, it’s easy to make imbalance mean something about you—that you misjudged, that you overshared. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think vulnerability is the mistake. I think where we place it is.
Brené Brown says vulnerability is the birthplace of connection, and I believe that. But that doesn’t mean we offer everything to everyone. I don’t believe we are meant to connect with everyone. It’s our responsibility to ourselves and one another to learn to notice who is capable of holding our vulnerability. Because not everyone knows how to hold what you’ve lived. And that’s not a failure. It’s information that should guide your next step toward or away from someone.
Kevin Gilliland, a clinical psychologist and the author of Struggle Well, Live Well, describes vulnerability as the bridge to real connection—the moment where two people allow themselves to be seen beyond what’s easy or impressive or appealing. But that kind of connection requires something mutual. It requires someone on the other side to stay present without reducing what you’ve said into something more comfortable. And not everyone can. You know this already.
Some people are careless. Some people get uncomfortable and change the subject. Some people hear your depth and try to make it lighter, easier, less true. That doesn’t mean you are too much. It means they are not the place for you to bring that kind of truth.
Many of us have learned to survive by anticipating outcomes—reading the room, reading other people, adjusting ourselves in real time. We think this protects us. We think it saves us from disappointment. But vulnerability interrupts that narrative. It demands that you speak the truth without knowing how it will land. That’s the real risk.
And still, I don’t think the answer is to close yourself off. I think the answer is to become even more precise. To pay attention to the subtleties of your body and your breath. To notice who listens without motive, who doesn’t reshape your words into something more comfortable for them. It’s on us to pay attention to how someone holds the small things before we offer them more of ourselves. Because vulnerability without discernment isn’t connection—it’s exposure. And that’s where so many of us get wounded.
After years of writing about my life and living it out in an incredibly public way, I’ve learned this: love and pain enter through the same door. There isn’t a separate entrance for one and not the other. If you close yourself off to the risk, you close yourself off to the possibility of intimacy.
And when we refuse the possibility, we don’t just avoid pain—we limit our lives. We stay in relationships that never deepen. We perform versions of ourselves that never quite feel real. We protect ourselves from rejection, yes, but also from love, from trust, from the kind of connection we are actually here on this planet to experience.
I don’t believe we’re here to live carefully edited lives. I think we’re here to tell the truth as we come to know it, to let it be seen and heard and honored in the places where it can be held. And to trust that the right people won’t make you pay for your honesty—they’ll meet it with their own.
There are still tickets available for our online salon on April 1st! This event will be recorded and shared with all registered participants so even if the time doesn’t align with your schedule, I’d love for you to join us for a 90-minute literary gathering where 8 writers will share original work about love in all forms. Come listen, connect, and witness. 🖤 Proceeds will go to Moms4Moms NYC, a non-profit dedicated to helping bring support to single mothers.
Loved it.