On being publicly vulnerable…
So I’m an introvert and terrified of public speaking. Seems simple right? Well I’m also someone who goes to conventions a lot and does panels and such. That’s easy, because the focus is not all on me by my lonesome. Anything that happens, I’m not alone.
Fast forward to the last couple of weeks, and me getting more and more nervous about my upcoming talk at AlterConf Chicago. I’m not shy or subtle and I’ll often have moments of uncertainty, fear, panic publicly either on twitter, twitter, or on Facebook. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time I just want to vent and move on.
Sometimes I even go so far as to say “I am having a moment, I need to get this off my chest, please do not give me advice or tell me it will be OK!” and just about ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the time? People do the exact fucking opposite of what I’ve asked, or if I haven’t actually said please don’t they roll in with nuggets of wisdom, ideas and on some incredibly tone-deaf occasions, they attempt a humorous response to my angst and woe.
Or, I will occasionally get a you’re so brave to talk about how hard this is! kind of comment. I don’t understand that, well I do. We’ve been socialized to not discuss hardship, or talk about difficulty lest we be seen as ungrateful, or arrogant or having faux humility. I don’t believe in hiding your struggles. After all if someone else, even one other person can see that you too, person they know only from the internet doesn’t have their shit together it might mean they don’t give up on things.
Life is hard for most of us, that’s nothing surprising. There’s some people who never want for anything and they are lucky. A lot of us though, struggle emotionally, financially, physically or in a combination of those three along with other issues. It shouldn’t be a rare thing to have a moment of I’m having a hard day, I just need to vent in our spaces.
It’s almost getting to the point where if you admit your struggle, or that you aren’t having the best day that you are shamed for it. How dare you say you are not a shiny, happy people 24/7! How dare you make others feel bad because you don’t have it in you today? Is often how I feel about people who respond to moments of public vulnerability. Or they mean well, they really, really do but they don’t get that somedays you just need to yell electronically (or hell, sometimes literally) and get things out before they poison you.
So when someone has that moment, let them. Don’t offer platitudes of it will be OK! You’ll be fine! You’re great and thing you are doing will be great! It often doesn’t help. Being happy, being seen as positive all the time isn’t genuine, that’s the fake thing to me. We all have bad days, where it’s not so shiny and chrome, but we fall, we get up, we fall, and get up again to fight another day.
