Everything clicked when I realized that vulnare is the Latin root word for “to wound” in Latin, and that that is the word that vulnerability comes from.
Vulnerability is giving someone the key to your apartment and trusting that they won’t steal anything. Vulnerability is climbing inside someone’s mouth and trusting that they won’t chomp down on you. Vulnerability is giving someone permission to wound you, and yet, trusting and knowing that they won’t.
I’ve had to deal with vulnerability a lot when getting sober. My biggest problem was assuming that people would look at me the way I looked at myself in the mirror the first time I realized I was an addict… a tinge of disappointment, a lot of disgust and a huge amount of hatred towards what I became.
But I learned something the day I was honest with everyone in my life for the first time in two years. I learned that real friends don’t get mad at you for lying to them about how you hurt yourself — they just want to be there for you any way they know how.
They didn’t ask me how I could keep a straight face and how I could sleep at night knowing all the lies I carried with me. No, they just asked what they could do to help me! I know! I’m the one who betrayed them countless times, and yet, they have the heart to ask me how they can help me.
It’s because people don’t want to see you get hurt if they truly love you. And they don’t want to perpetuate the suffering you’ve already put onto yourself.
That’s been mind-boggling to me, because if it were me, I don’t know if I would have reacted the same. I thought they would look at me differently, as if the fog of lies that I had cast would settle and they would see me all my gangrene arms and legs. I thought they would at least flinch seeing how ugly I truly am. But nobody did. They just held me closer and let me cry and pity myself.
If you feel unloved, tell people how you’ve punished yourself when you didn’t deem yourself human. Then you will feel so much love that it’s hard to deny that it exists.
I remember in eighth grade I told my best friend that I tried to kill myself years ago, and she told me that she cuts herself, and we just cried together. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but what it did was strengthen our relationship, even though it ended years later. Because no sane person wants someone they love to suffer silently. I don’t know what was going through her head at the time, but I remember crying those tears not for myself, but for her. I was so sorry that I wasn’t there for her and she felt the need to punish herself in that way. I think tears were what she wanted. She wanted someone to feel bad for her for the first time in a long time.
Love is tricky, but it’s also very obvious when the time is right. Addiction plants a seed in your soul, and can only be watered by self-pity. When that seed dies is when others find out and pity you themselves. You realize you hated pity all along. You realize you just wanted to be normal this entire time.
I don’t know why I’m a person that can’t use drugs normally, but it’s something I have come to accept. My friends don’t look at me like some junkie freak. They look at me the same as before. I think, if anything, they look at me more truthfully now.
I realize all my life I was shifting my gaze away from people. I never could maintain eye contact, fearful of what people would find that existed underneath my pupils. I was afraid they would see me for who I truly was, and they would hate it.
I thought I could never be loved for who I was. I always thought I had to maintain a farce in order to be accepted. That’s how my life had always been — it’s like I was assigned a role and I played my part very well. So well in fact I believed it too. But I’ve found the opposite is true. Even if you’re broken and piteous and sad, people will still love you, because they love you for you. And they hate to see you become someone you’re not.
If you hate yourself and you’re surrounded by people who look at you like you view yourself, the only way to stop hating yourself is to be around people who see you for the opposite as you see yourself. Be around people who can’t imagine why you would ever try to kill yourself.
One thing someone told me after I got out of the psych ward for attempting suicide was, “Amanda! I can’t imagine why you would do that. I’m so jealous of you. If you do that, then what do I have going for me?” At first I was angry. Over time, I realize, I’m jealous of how they view me. I wish I thought of my own life as something special and worthwhile. And you should only surround yourself with people like that, that can’t fathom why you would try to do that.
Vulnerability is hard. But, aren’t most satisfactory things hard? Like taking a cold shower, or exercising. I find that honesty hurts in the moment, but is much longer lasting satisfactorily than lying. Lying eats away at you everyday until there’s nothing left. Honesty builds you up stronger than you were before.
At first, I was so scared of being wounded. But I’ve found nobody can wound me worse than I’ve wounded myself, and from there, I have found peace, love and virtue. I pray for the same to happen to all of you.
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