Vulnerability of Showing Up

I’ve just come off a recording of two podcast episodes, one for my own Inspired Writer Collective podcast and as a guest on Angela’s Been There Dunn That. While I always press record with some basic intention of subject matter to cover or introduce, I live by the philosophy of great content happening organically, so ultimately I allow the conversation to go wherever it may.

Today’s recording took me by surprise. There was something in Angela’s description of her podcast mission and intent around grief, trauma, and giving voice to the typically silent suffering that pushed me to share a raw and vulnerable story.

I talked about a segment of the memoir I wrote only a few days earlier. As I wrote the piece, I anticipated the judgment I would likely receive from future readers. I had to stop myself from editing and redacting as I tried to lay out the emotions I felt immediately post-divorce and with the separation the co-parenting schedule created from Ember. The grief sucked me into a deep hole that felt isolating and permanent. I felt a loss of identity from my previous full-time mother status. At the time, I reflected on how similar I must be feeling in that moment to parents that faced the death of a child. And then I recoiled at the thought that others reading those words may think I was equating my own temporary grief to that of a grieving parent. How could I accurately share the feelings of that moment? Did I have any right to them?

In the vulnerable podcast conversation with Angela, she reminded me I shared those words because I sought validation from blog posts and other online resources and came up with nothing. I looked for others that were feeling the way I felt in that moment, but all the resources I located talked from a more healed perspective, not in the acute state of grief and raw emotion. Angela reminded me that we write not for everyone but for that one person who is seeking, like I was, legitimacy of their feelings.

Showing up is vulnerable. Being honest about what I’m feeling in the moment is vulnerable. And yet, it is only through that vulnerability that I can authentically express my experience and perspective. I can only speak to my own experience, to my hardest days, to my depth of emotions. And in exploring them I tap into a deeper state of empathy for those who have also been to the depths of the human experience.