If you know me at all, you know that if you give me even half a chance I will bore you to tears by talking about Ted Talks.  I listen to them all the time – in the car, while I’m exercising, before I go to sleep, whenever.  I have always wanted to attend a Ted event, but so far it hasn’t happened.  Yesterday I listened to a talk about vulnerability by this genius named Brene Brown.  It was fantastic, link is here, and it’s timely.  I struggle with vulnerability a lot, especially lately.  I feel like I have spent a lot of the last two years trying to be vulnerable and now that it’s seemingly blown up in my face, it would be easy to just regret having tried.  Listen to the talk (bossy!), but here are the highlights:

–        Her studies have found that people with a strong sense of love and belonging believe that they are worthy of love and belonging.  That sounds incredibly simple, but I think we all know it’s not.

–        You cannot embrace vulnerability if you numb vulnerability and you can’t selectively numb your emotions, so if you do that, you also numb joy, gratitude, happiness, etc.  I’ve been numbing pain, loneliness, anger, fear, and shame but by doing so I have numbed hope and happiness.

Vulnerable to me is saying that I have screwed up my love life.  I am not where I want to be.  Two months ago I found out I was pregnant, had a miscarriage and broke up with my boyfriend in a space of about two weeks.  This may seem like a horrible chain of events, but for me it was merely the final straw.  When you go through a horrible thing like losing a baby, you see things very clearly, and what I saw was a man who was not there for me and who was lying to me, himself, and everyone else in his life about what I meant to him and what he wanted.  And as hard as this has been, ultimately it’s been easier to be alone and sad and healing than to be jealous and angry and confused.

Vulnerability is saying that I am starting a blog – and I hope that people read it and connect with it and I hope that people enjoy it, but people might think that I’m full of shit, that I’m a horrible writer and might say things to hurt me.  Risking is putting it out there but vulnerable is actually putting my last name on it.  Vulnerable would be actually sharing it with my friends – so far I’ve only sent the link to two people that I trust completely – but vulnerable would be throwing that link on my Facebook page.  Maybe someday.