{"id":1045,"date":"2015-02-08T21:42:11","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T02:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2020-02-21T21:09:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-22T02:09:03","slug":"lets-get-shamelessly-vulnerable-part-i-vulnerability-is-courage-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/life-love-family\/lets-get-shamelessly-vulnerable-part-i-vulnerability-is-courage-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s Get Shamelessly Vulnerable! Part I: Vulnerability is Courage. Seriously."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bren\u00e9 Brown<\/a> is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. You may have heard of her, she\u2019s been promoted by Oprah and did a Ted Talk that to date has had nearly 5 million views worldwide. She hit the big time with her message a few years ago, including having a couple of best-sellers on the New York Times list. So yeah, you\u2019ve probably heard of her, unless\u2014like me\u2014you tend to shun popular culture, don\u2019t read NY Times best-sellers until years later, and don\u2019t watch broadcast television. If you\u2019re in that camp, you know what it\u2019s like to hit upon how cool something like the flip phone is only to realize the world is already queuing up for the iPhone 6.<\/p>\n

Yes, I\u2019m a little behind. The only time I watch \u201clive\u201d TV is when I visit my mom. Occasionally my travels involve a hotel, and I\u2019m so stunned by the unbelievable amount of crap on TV that I channel surf just to remind myself that canceling cable in 2004 was one of the healthiest acts I\u2019ve ever committed. Sometimes I interact with TV watchers and purveyors of current culture. A few years ago, coworkers at the time were discussing the latest news of the Kardashians. I thought they were talking about a new race of characters on Star Trek. Then they politely reminded me that Star Trek had been off the air for six years. It\u2019s no surprise that people often treat me like I\u2019ve just walked out of a cave in Whereverstan.<\/p>\n

So what does this have to do with Bren\u00e9 Brown? Actually, not a lot except to say that I\u2019ve only recently discovered her, while for the rest of you she may be yesterday\u2019s news. Anyway, this is my blog, and if I want to write about yesterday\u2019s news, I can. Besides, Ms. Brown has helped me uncover the root of my predicament as a creative writer: I\u2019m not vulnerable enough. To paraphrase her, vulnerability is an act of courage. We put on protective armor thinking that to have courage means never let \u2018em see you sweat or know that you don\u2019t have a solution or that you can\u2019t handle a situation or that you struggle at times because some things just don\u2019t have easy answers. Nowhere in the world is there a person who doesn\u2019t fear vulnerability. Nowhere but here in DC is it more important to have extra-strength armor to protect against vulnerability because, God forbid, a politician could turn out to be human. (The jury might still be chewing its cud on the latter claim, although DNA evidence does suggest it could be true.)<\/p>\n

Who wants to be vulnerable? Society has quite insidiously taught us that vulnerability is weakness and weakness is death. We put ourselves out there and we get burned, sometimes wishing we would<\/em> die on the spot if only to end the unbearable pain and humiliation. We quit, lash out, sidestep, fake it, lie, or never even try not because we\u2019re weak but because we don\u2019t understand that being vulnerable is actually courageous.<\/p>\n

Ms. Brown says \u201cVulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren\u2019t always comfortable, but they\u2019re never weakness.\u201d She\u2019s talking about what it really means to be vulnerable as opposed to the macho never-let-\u2018em-see-you-sweat brain worm that society has implanted in us.<\/p>\n

So who wants to be vulnerable? Well, who wants to be courageous? Join me in the next several blog posts to explore this topic likely to freak out many. I don\u2019t know exactly where this is going, but consider that confession a first step toward a willingness to publicly announce my expedition into the dangerous territory of Shameless Vulnerability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bren\u00e9 Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. You may have heard of her, she\u2019s been promoted by Oprah and did a Ted Talk …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-love-family"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1046,"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lunarivervoices.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}