Heck, I can’t even spell the word vulnerable much less “do it” very well. What does it mean to be vulnerable anyway? How in the world did “they” (you know, a group of people from long ago who sat in one big room thinking and planning all of our lives down through history) come up with that word anyway? It looks like it ought to have something to do with vultures or being vulture-like.

But I digress….

To me, being vulnerable means being able to maintain that balance of having your feelings but not putting them on anybody. Or, at least, not having your feelings with a million tiny whip-like threads reeling out to pull victims in towards you for later eating, like some giant emotional-spider person. You know the type, you’ve probably come across one or two in your life or perhaps you’ve even been guilty of spinning a GESP web yourself at some point in your life.

Being vulnerable with class doesn’t mean you wipe away your tears with a Hermes scarf (though that would be cool) but rather that you know how to let others see you when you don’t have it all together and your in mid-trying-to-figure-out-who-and-what-and-how-to-trust. I feel like I walk around with a big shiny blue baboon butt so much in my life that learning how to be vulnerable with others is really, really uncomfortable for me as I’m sure it is for you as well. Besides which I have a slight speech impediment when it comes to saying the “vul” in vulnerable (really wicked librarian-types had to have created that word).

Right now I feel like I’m in mid-cry. There’s been just enough happening in my life that it’s kind of knocked me a bit off kilter yet none of it is enough to knock me down completely. It’s like I need to have a really good sneeze and I keep taking inhales ready to release with the biggest sneeze ever, only the sneeze won’t come. So, I have to give up trying to control how I’m going to respond and surrender to feeling vulnerable. We Aries-types surely don’t like being in such a spot. Give me a big juicy traumatic or dramatic event that needs someone to come in and calm things down and get thing in order and make everything okay and I’m your gal. But don’t pitch me into this nether space of waiting and not quite knowing where to go next. This must be how fetuses feel when they’re floating in embryonic fluid or at least how the astronauts feel when they go outside their spaceship to tighten a bolt or whatever excuse they use to go outside and float in wonderment. That’s about how slowly my movements feel in going on to the next “thing”, whatever that is, in my life. In fact, I betcha if someone was to stick a microphone up to me and ask me what I was doing now, everything would come out in r e a l s l o w m o t i o n and sound very very distorted and slow..

It’s interesting though that in both examples I used about how I feel in limbo, that both are attached to something greater than themselves (Mom or ship take your pick). I guess I have to trust that I have an invisible chord attached to my HP and that really in the great scheme of things, everything is okay. I’m just feeling a bit vulnerable.

Geesh, that word! Even when I sound it out silently while typing this, in my mind it sounds like I’ve eaten peanut butter and had a big glass of milk. Vulnerable. See?!?!?! Like a deep dreaming sleep-talking Barney Fife floating backwards into limbo, I’m off to practice being vulnerable……..