Vulnerability as rebellion

“Sometimes vulnerability might look like rebellion to someone else.” So proclaimed Kyndra Frazier – a pastor, mental health professional, and self-described hope innovator (I love that term!) – from the Nevertheless She Preached stage. If God is working for our thriving, she said, then we can risk standing in our truth and fully inhabiting our bodies.

I confess, I struggle with the V word. Mightily. I’ve assumed for a long time that it’s because I am an internal processor, a left-brained thinker, and a deeply private person. But lately I’ve remembered I was more outgoing – more willing to wear my heart on my sleeve – at one time. Case in point: I remember holding a boom box out the window of a friend’s house, crying and blasting Debbie Gibson, to try to win back a boyfriend in the sixth grade. Most of the girls in my grade were inside the house, while many of my male classmates were outside. I was not deterred by the gazes and whispers of this party-sized crowd. (The aim of this exercise was problematic, for sure, but also indicative that my resistance to vulnerability is learned, not inherent.)

I pinpoint the first day of seventh grade as my withdrawal into myself. New school. New people. New universe, as a formerly public school kid starting private school. The first bell rang, and I was clueless. Was I supposed to go to my first class, or was there some sort of orientation first? The first night of homework – a trauma that devolved into tears and lashing out at my parents and lasted into the early hours of the next day – zapped my confidence. The first weeks went by, and the best friend I’d followed to this new school disappeared into a new circle of peers. It suddenly felt too risky to lay out my hopes and fears and anxieties, so I stopped doing so. I was being strong and stoic, I told myself. Who wants to be a walking puddle?

What I didn’t realize was that I was playing into cultural messages that keep us isolated so that we cannot find each other, band together, and affect change. But vulnerability as rebellion exposes those messages and the systems they support for the evils they are. It prompts us to tell our stories to one another so that we see God in all people. It broadcasts the needs we each have and the barriers we encounter to having those needs met so that we can remove those obstacles. It joins us at the heart with people we see as soul siblings, and it reminds us that our vulnerability is exactly the power we need to overhaul unjust institutions. Sharing my vulnerability in service to rebellion is the least I can do as someone with relative privilege, recognizing that others’ efforts to be authentic have much higher stakes.

I’m going to try to be more vulnerable, because these times call for rebellion. Will you join me?

[Note: this is the second of four posts inspired by the Nevertheless She Preached Conference.]