the vulnerability trap

is it cold out here or is it just me?

The reality that it’s impossible to be perceived on exactly your own terms is equal parts crushing and freeing. If being seen feels already like enough of an affront, being seen wrong is a dagger to the heart. Something you said or did or who you are being taken in a way you didn’t intend is enough to keep the deepest sleeper up at night. Then again, if you bare your heart too openly, too earnestly, it might let in the wrong people. Or maybe you’re just not meant to have that much of you on show. It’s cold out there with your skin peeled back.

I’m a big believer that synonyms have limited use, because every word is so deeply specific in its exact meaning. Even if it makes what you’re trying to say somewhat ineffable, and it means something different to someone else. It’s why good writing feels so resonant, like a perfect wine pairing. I have a bad habit of asking people how they’d feel if their writing was interpreted differently to how they meant it. I keep waiting for someone to be honest and say they wouldn’t like it. No one does, but I don’t believe them

There are a lot of words when it comes to identifying what exactly about a piece of art made you feel seen, heard, known. They’re all slightly different. Authentic is what came naturally. Real is early morning lighting where you can see all of your pores. Vulnerable is a little too close to the bone for the person putting it out, sink or swim, reverberate or shatter. True is all of these things and none of them.

None of these things need coexist to apply. It’s why labels like raw or gritty feel so superfluous. Raw is what you call the book that made you feel uncomfortable about how little you knew of the world before opening it. Gritty is what you call a BBC drama about an angry middle-aged woman with a mid-strength accent from the North of England. The words have lost their punch, because everything has to be so overwhelmingly real to be worth anything.

I don’t have a problem with vulnerability, per se. But I find its use as some form of currency disheartening. I am never, ever interested in being pathologised or condoled by a stranger. I find it hard enough to have my edges come into focus for someone I’m close to, I don’t want anyone who has no claim to me feeling entitled to truths about me. The intentionality behind vulnerability is telling, in this sense. If it’s designed to point piercing eyes elsewhere it can be impactful, if it’s an overflow that’s determined to be viable in the big wide world it’s meaningful. If it’s offloaded for the sake of personal branding, relatability for relatability’s sake, it’s soulless. It’s worth keeping an open-heart-policy nevertheless. Better to experience things in high definition than to be blunted. 

And on words and their gentle specificity, I’ve been mulling over what it is to provoke something versus to evoke. To provoke is to ignite, spark to tinder, to create windows where previously there were only walls and give a chance for those outside to look in and pass judgement, throw stones, blow kisses. To evoke is to draw out what already exists. A feeling bubbling under the surface, a thought that was a ghost until it was touched and became corporeal so as not to let the hand fall through. A connection that didn’t have a reason to be visible until something threatened it. A breath, a scream. I lean towards spawning work that evokes because it feels like knowing and being known. Reaching inside another person and pulling up the stem, leaves, petals of what had before just been seeds is a tender process. Many have done it for me without any knowledge of what bloomed under their gaze. Gently human in its essence. Near pathological.

In my more pretentious moments, I see the creative force as less of a metaphor and more of a real spirit. I consider, lightly, her call, which may not be aimed at me but I answer it nonetheless. I forgive her push and pull, I dread her moments of unwithstandable gravitational force and her hours, days, weeks of silence. I’m thankful for the spring when our heartlines intersected and I fell in step with her. And she with me, after a lifetime of trying. A very small lifetime, true. But a lifetime. The words came for me at an early age but I found them too demanding to keep up, until relatively recently in the grand scheme of a lifetime. Now I couldn’t get rid of them if I wanted to.

Once, on a second date, a man told me he could never be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t an artist. It wasn’t my kindest moment, but the self-seriousness of the statement made me laugh. I couldn’t quite explain why, but I think I was jarred by the idea that someone could unashamedly think of themselves as an artist in a way that defined them. I couldn’t do that. Art was a part of my life growing up, but it always seemed to be framed as something that didn’t get anyone anywhere, something unviable. In my family you don’t complain that things aren’t better, you just work harder, even if the way the system’s rigged won’t allow that to give you any leverage. Where’s the room for being an artist in all of that? There wasn’t a third date, if you’re wondering.

But I do feel more like an artist than I ever have. I’ve never liked the idea that an ‘artist’, whatever that means, sees the world in a way that’s more meaningful than everybody else. So much of that dangerous reverence we (I) have for artists beyond their art comes from the idea that special comes from special. If I am unremarkable, how could I construct something otherwise? It’s not that you can absorb the beauty or suffering around you in a way others can’t, not the way I choose to see it. But for the first time in my life I create more than I consume. I write every day without realising I’ve done it. I art, even if I am not an artist.

I have thousands and thousands of words that will never see the light of day, despite how easily they would fit into what’s popular and digestible, because they’re much too personal to be for show. And that’s what they’d be, if I let them out. It’d all be to be seen, not for any real impact. Putting them on a page has done everything it can do for me, they don’t need to go any further than that. 

And then the simplest things feel fake, unreal, without that depth. Each snapshot feels like a performance that doesn’t account for the world that it tries to reflect, like fridge magnet poetry. In the afternoon, I eat the world’s stalest coco pops out of a mug sat on the kitchen floor. Walking home from work, I turn my brightness all the way down so no one sees me scouring guardian dot com forward slash recipes. How can I pull off this nonchalant baggy-jeans-with-leather-jacket combo if everyone on the street can see me looking at an Ottolenghi orzo salad? There are definitely those who’d call me a class traitor for eating this much aubergine on a weekday. In the evening, I drink champagne and reapply lipstick and compare life drawing classes and casually throw out comments on The Scene, not knowing how I picked up enough to sound as though I know what I’m talking about. Where exactly is The Scene? It’s not here in this bathroom with me while I stare into the mirror breathing deeply, while I practise relaxing my face, while I tell myself that there’s nothing to worry about because my mouth is a perfectly normal size. When I feel swept up in a world that isn’t mine it’s not that there’s anything inauthentic, but when I reach out to grasp for the one that is, I pull my arms back empty handed. I feel like only one side of the dice can be taken in at once, and it panics me, because they only make sense as a net, unwrapped to see how it fits together. And how do you ever become comfortable with the fact that someone could read just one piece of writing and have only that to draw an impression from?

Here it is: internal monologue will always sound a little dark. A little like grey clouds overhead, a little like being alone in a house as day turns to night. I write about the most normal, neutral day in my life and receive condolences. The happier parts sound like determined affirmations that I don’t quite believe, or at least as though then only matter as long as they can be viewed alongside all of the misfortune. But there isn’t really that much misfortune to begin with. It’s just easier, more connective maybe, to infer that there is. I wonder if I’m embodying the sad girl trope every time I write about cold coffee or chipped nail varnish. But I truly believe that most introspective, typically first person writing from women will sound vaguely bleak. I am frustratingly average, decidedly hinged, and yet if I wrote out every thought I have on a day-to-day basis, I’d sound like any one of the ‘unhinged woman fiction’ books you’re sick of (me too). There are so many things about the way that we’re programmed that are inherently twisted, so much so that it’s almost less brutal to turn those thoughts into surrealist short stories and caricaturized novels. 

I take a deep breath when I make my writing visible, knowing that it’s the beginning of the end of controlling what those words mean. I’m out of the drivers seat, I’m blindfolded. Eyes fall over my words and projectors whirr into motion with light to blind me if I choose to look their way, shining in harmony with one another but each loaded with entirely different ammunition. I’m thrown to the wolves, the dark shadow of their open jaws steals my vision. The wolves have such sweet breath that I can’t help but return to them every time.

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