Vulnerability

A few days ago I made a video about living with Bell’s palsy, which I’ve been doing for 11 years.

 And it seemed to resonate with a lot of people I have not seen in a  long time—   like 20 years—  people just reaching out to say hello.

And that was incredibly sweet. 

And then it resonated with a lot of people who talked about my being able to show my vulnerability and my pain and suffering. 

So, I was going to talk about some more exercises, but instead, I’m going to talk about vulnerability and what that means exactly. 

I read a lot of Facebook guest posts because I find them to be interesting—  regular people talking about their regular stuff —  and I took a paragraph from one of them that I felt was interesting.

It was a woman talking about bullying and being bullied and reaching out to her bullies. 

She says “for decades, I’ve struggled with low-grade depression, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and underachievement, that have persisted despite years of therapy. I want to argue not that my mental health issues STEM only from the bullying I encountered in school, but these experience and my lifelong shyness, hypersensitivity and self-consciousness, which made me a perfect targeting for bullying and exclusion, have had a lasting effect on me”.

I feel that I am very much in the same, or similar, boat to this woman.   

What’s interesting though is I also I feel like I have social anxiety. I hate parties. I hate small talk. I’ve never understood why I am inarticulate around people in normal settings.

I have a friend who started taking my yoga classes and he’s a dear friend. And if I have a dear friend, I’m very articulate. 

And with my immediate family, I’m very articulate. But he used to comment on how, when I was teaching, I was in total command. And then the second class ended I become this inarticulate boob and not be able to speak. 

And that is kind of me.