Vulnerable is being cold while wearing all the warm clothes you brought on a camping trip. If you were cold but still had just an extra hat in your backpack or hadn't put on your gloves yet, you wouldn't feel as vulnerable.
It is not having anything to do on a Friday night other than staying home. When you make the choice to stay in, turning down other options, that is not vulnerable.
It is showing someone your weaknesses or your passions or how much you truly care, and leaving it all out there, with nothing hidden, no choice in what else to say or keep secret.
Vulnerable is not having any control, because your choice has been made for you.
Vulnerable is fear. Fear that if anything -- any circumstances, any feelings, etc. -- might change, you won't be ready because your options are all used up.
Vulnerable is not knowing if you'll be all right.
A major vulnerability I notice in my life is not knowing what the future will hold. Just about every moment of every day, I cope with this by trying to project forward to predict my future based on what happens now, and changing my behavior/thinking if I don't like where things are going. My idea of the future often thrashes around violently, and my present is consumed and overshadowed by imagining, based on the last hour or the last fifteen minutes, where my life will lead. Am I a good person (who therefore will have a decent life)? If the next question I ask in class is a dumb one, will I be able to make it in science? Is this relationship one that will lead to happiness for the next 50 years? That's a lot of pressure to put on the present, and what if the answer, the projection, comes up negative, as it inevitably will?
As my therapist and I discussed this week, this forward-projecting seems analogous to the butterfly effect. Imagine a butterfly incessantly trying to predict the weather thousands of miles away and then flapping its wings this way and that in an attempt to change the result to something better.
I'm now starting to recognize this fear of the unknown future when it comes up. It especially comes up when I feel lonely, because I don't know if I'll end up being a lonely soul. And I stake a lot on not ending up a lonely soul, as another one of my defense mechanisms -- I don't know many things about my future, such as where I'll live, who I'll be close to, what I will do for my career, and so many more smaller things, but I think that all of these come secondary to my family life. If I can have a nice home life, the other details don't bug me as much. And when that is put into question, that's scary. My fear response kicks in.
I don't want to feel driven to date someone out of fear of being a lonely soul. I don't want to seek validation through flirting just to comfort my fear of being a lonely soul.
I want to find a balance between taking the present as one instant in a slew of instants and appreciating it as such, and keeping my future in mind.
I don't want to be so afraid of the unknown. These are fear responses 5 year old Kieran developed. They aren't what I need now.
