What I Don't Want You to Know About Me.
Brene Brown, who is famous for her research on vulnerability, writes, “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
Being itself, as I’m learning recently, is a courageous act.
My head has been swimming with this stuff recently since I’m preoccupied with the uncertainties of growing a small business and finding purpose. I’m still trying to make peace with the counter-logical wisdom of vulnerability. Vulnerability is a gift that never has failed to reward me when I’ve genuinely trusted it. When I am vulnerable, I move in the direction of reality instead of the fantasies (both good and bad) that I tell about myself.
Why would anyone want to be vulnerable? Because it is the greatest weapon against anxiety.
Anxiety finds its power in ambiguity. Anxiety is different, in my opinion, from fear. (although these days, “fear” has become a blanket term meant to cover both concepts, which is not helpful.) Fear is specific and often urgent. Fear keeps us alive. Anxiety is fear without purpose; fear without a direction. This is what makes anxiety fo insidious.
Vulnerability fights anxiety by naming the qualities you fear about yourself and attempting to view them as friends instead of enemies. It puts an end to hiding and takes responsibility for the horror and the glory of being alive.
So I got this thought. This blog is usually about something I do want you to know about me or my thoughts, what if I switched that and sent you a list of things I don’t want you to know (or wish you didn’t already since there is no fooling your real friends.) as an act of vulnerability.
Here we go:
I’m more egotistic than I let on.
Here’s the crazy thing: all this talk about vulnerability, it’s a spike in my ego. I love to feel enlightened. It makes me feel superior and in control. My favorite flavor of narcissism is self-deprecation because it looks like humility, but it still aims to keep the ego at the center of life. My religion was fertile soil for this type of behavior to flourish since it implicitly rewarded self-sacrificial living without boundaries. Because I thought “ego was the enemy,” it became more influential in my life, and it created a scapegoat-self to focus on, all the while orchestrating the enlightenment. I’m only just now trying to reintroduce myself to my ego to understand him. I think the way to prevent the ego from acting out in destructive ways. The ego must be loved for its beauty and limitations. It must be integrated back into the whole.
2. I steal everything I know and say.
There is a little lie that I keep alive in my head that says, “only the original idea is valuable.” I’ve wrestled with this lie for as long as I can remember, Even though I preach the contrary. I don’t believe that true originality exists, What I think people mean when they experience something “original” is something that brings us back to something we forgot that we knew but by which we are surprised. It doesn’t matter if it is a story about what it’s like to grow up in Kabul Afghanistan, and I’m a white guy from Greeley. “Originality” is the connection between our two experiences of life. Since I don’t believe that I can generate anything ex-nihlo, then I only arrange, interpret, steal, and imitate everything I love. Someone always said it better, so I collect their words and pass them out to whoever engages with me. I collect everything without know why I need it. They made me feel something. For example, rattling around in my head is Paul Tillich, Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius, David Sedaris, Jack Chick, Dolly Parton, and the TV show “Fleabag.” Why? Who knows! However, I’m likely going to experiment with the connections I’m making on you in our next conversation. Everything I’ve made up to this point was just my attempt to do what my Heros succeeded in.
3. I Constantly Feel like I’ll never make anything creative again.
Compared to many artistic people, I haven’t accomplished that much, but still, I managed somehow to produce a new one-act play and several short sketches every year for 13 years, and thousands of people watched them and liked them. I’ve created a bunch of other live events and videos that people have seen. I wrote a book and recorded music. (I didn’t mean to make those last couple of sentences so humble-braggy. Yuk.) but I continually think that maybe I’m dried up, and I don’t have anything left to say. Every time I get a project to act, sing, or write, I wonder if this will be the time I can’t fulfill my promise. I will give my best, and it will still be found wanting. Every time another project turns out ok, there is a part of me that is always a bit surprised. It’s like, every time I’m in a car crash, and I walk away without a scrape (not necessarily because of the project but because I’m trying to skate the edge of my ability). I think everything has to end sometime, and how long will I be able to keep this up. What gives me the courage to keep trying is when I hear the artists I look up to share the same fears. Recently I listened to an interview with Judd Apatow, where he shared his self-doubt, and I’ve heard the same from other favorites like Johnathan Goldstein, Ryan Adams, and Tom Waits.
4. Focus is my Great Nemesis.
Sometimes my head feels like five radios playing different stations loudly in the same room at the same time. There are so many great ideas that I want to be born in the world, but I don’t get a chance at them since I’ve filled my life with so much work to be done! And let me tell you, this damn tech isn’t helping! My focus is the victim of my addiction to hurry and fast growth. In many ways, it is the resistance I have toward responsibility. Responsibility means precisely what its spelling suggests “the ability to respond” this is different than reactivity, which is the activity of reaction. I get tossed around, thinking that I’m responding, but true responsibility is an orientation toward reality, reactivity has an orientation toward urgency. What is urgent isn’t necessarily essential, but it still hits your brain in the same way.
I know I’m not that unique in this challenge; we are a distracted people. However, I think my particular mind is probably more prone to shiny objects.
So there you have it, folks! This has been a complicated experiment for me because, as you have probably already picked up on, this has only been a controlled vulnerability. It’s all true...to a point. There are only a very few people who have known me long enough and intimately enough, who I can be “ugly-vulnerable” with. This is a good start, though. I hope you can have some people you can be ugly-vulnerable with and a bigger group that you feel safe enough to share your controlled-vulnerability with. I trust that you will see the rewards of this kind of life just like I have.