Fearing Vulnerability

Writing for my mental health

I always begin these posts in the same way, but I do so because it's always true: I haven't written here in a long time. It's a problem. Adolescent and young-adult me were wise beyond their years. Writing down how I feel and trying to order my inner life is an invaluable task. When I don't do it, I tend to lose track of myself. The demands of daily life can easily occupy one's time so fully that you forget to check the pulse of your mental health. I certainly have. But I'm going to check in now. I want to talk about vulnerability.

My fear of vulnerability and its negative consequences

One of the hardest things about being human is navigating interpersonal relationships. It's no profound statement, but it's true. I think all of my deepest emotional wounds have been inflicted by something wrong happening in an interpersonal relationship. I can trace the biggest scars easily: I'm moved away from a group of friends I love as a child; a girl doesn't love me back in adolescence; a girl doesn't love me back in early young adulthood; during early university, a girl by her own confession dumps me for no clear reason; I can't connect with people in a foreign language on my year abroad; my first long-term girlfriend finds somebody new (not while we're together) and I feel discarded; a sexual experience goes wrong and I feel terrible and conflicted over what happens, and lose friends -- all these things compound over time and result in a terrible fear of putting yourself out there, a fear of vulnerability. And how does it manifest itself? Anxiety.

You avoid getting too close to new people. You distance yourself from the friends you already have. You second-guess everything about yourself, even if they're unrelated to your interpersonal mishaps. You second-guess your intellect, your attractiveness, your ethics, your basic worth as a human being.

That's what happened to me. After one too many burns, I developed a fear of being vulnerable and I withdrew. I took advantage of my lease ending and my uncertainty about the future, and I moved back home. I stopped talking to people and I quietly lived an unconnected life. It's easy to describe it as something more reasonable, like a "sabbatical", but the truth is it was simply the reaction of a scared human scorned.

Now I've moved back to London and I have a 6-month contract at a company I quite like. There is temporary stability and I'm talking to friends again, but hangovers of my fear of vulnerability still loom heavy. For example, I tried to catch up with a friend a few weeks back. She is a girl, she is engaging, and she is attractive. I could just view her as a friend, but my mind jumps right to romance, and romance requires vulnerability, so I made a mess of myself. There was much anxious babble and I still haven't messaged her since we met up. Because of my fear of vulnerability, our friendship is dead in the water. It's bad.

Also, I'm very quiet and reserved at work. In my life historically, I haven't been that reserved a person. But these days I'm so afraid of vulnerability, being judged, potentially being rejected, that I'm holding myself back. It's really bad. It actually affects potential progress in important things like my career.

So the question is, how do I overcome it? It affects my potential for romance, my potential for making new friends, and my career prospects. Being able to accept vulnerability as a fact of being human is crucial to any kind of important success. So: how do I overcome the fear?

Overcoming my fear of vulnerability

I don't know why I've made this a section of its own. I don't have the answers yet. I've done a bit of reading into what the internet psychiatrists think, and there are interesting suggestions. Advice and suggestions always smack of an "easier said than done" flavour, though.

One bit of advice is to remember that you're judging yourself far more harshly than anybody else is judging you. I think this is ultimately true, but it's hard to believe in the moment. While it's undoubtably true that people judge each other in ridiculous ways, for ridiculous thing, it's also true that someone like me who has developed a fear of vulnerability assumes I'll be judged with an intensity that I probably won't be. To take a real example, I was chatting with a co-worker in one of the first few weeks of my new job, and I made an absolutely fool of myself trying to talk about my masters dissertation. I've basically forgotten it entirely and I didn't do very well on it anyway, so I can't talk about it eloquently. In the abstract, making a fool of myself intellectually like that is terrifying to me, but in practice it hasn't come up at all since, and it doesn't appear as though he thinks any less of me. Perhaps on balance he would have been more impressed if I could talk eloquently about it, but the salient point is that he doesn't think I'm a moron or an embarrassment because I couldn't. People judge, but not with the intensity assumed by the fearful.

The practical takeaway from this would be I should be okay with imperfection and making foibles of my personality, because they wash away in the tides of time. People don't dwell on them in the same way you dwell on them yourself. People do remember when you shine, though. They remember when you put yourself out there and offer something out.

If this reflection was complete, I'd also have a bit here on how to stop myself dwelling on my personal foibles. But I don't know how I'd begin to do that, so I'll leave that for another time. This post has gone of for too long anyway.