Vulnerable

Always in shades, we didn’t know what her face looked like. Behind the shades, she seemed aloof, almost hostile.

Without the dark glasses, my friend and I were surprised at what we saw. To me, the look on her face was like that of a small child—innocent and open. I had the urge to protect and comfort her. My friend said that the woman seemed somewhat agitated. 

While I searched for a word to describe what we saw and felt, my friend said, “She looked vulnerable.”

Yes, vulnerable.

The rest of the week, I continued to think about the word “vulnerable.” What does it mean to feel and be vulnerable?

When I was with other friends, I would bring up the topic of vulnerability and ask them to tell me what being vulnerable meant to them and under what circumstances they recalled or would imagine that they would be vulnerable. 

My question elicited thoughtful responses. Most common among the ways of defining being vulnerable was feeling open, exposed, defenseless, transparent. When my friends described the circumstances when they thought they would feel or have felt vulnerable, they realized that what they were feeling was fear rather than what they thought of as vulnerability. The situations they described always involved fear of bodily harm by someone else.

Musing about fear and vulnerability, I realized that I would much rather experience fear than vulnerability.  I could use the adrenalin generated by fear to fight or flee. In such a scenario, fear comes from outside one’s self, stimulated by the threat of the other.

Experimenting with what I thought feeling vulnerable would be like, what came to mind were those instances in which close friends or family had hurt or disappointed me. Only people for whom I cared deeply could elicit a feeling of vulnerability. There is no rush of adrenalin. In fact, the heart is depressed. There is no fight or resistance. Only sadness, humility, and helplessness because in truth, being vulnerable requires cooperation of the self.

These thoughts bring me back to the mysterious woman who had a face of openness and innocence all the while showing a layer of pain. Based on this fleeting moment of visibility, I think that she had the courage to offer herself up to being vulnerable.