Is Vulnerability a Virtue?
On what we compliment when we compliment vulnerability in art
Often, after I publish a personal essay or a piece of fiction, readers reach out to me to thank me for being vulnerable. I’m always very touched by this reaction (actually, I joke that my love language is just people reading and complimenting my writing). I wonder if such a compliment is fully merited. And lately, I’ve wondered why “being vulnerable” is something we find praiseworthy.
Here is the dictionary definition of vulnerable: able to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked.
This definition makes me think of a baby bird, chirping desperately for its mother, a predator lurking nearby.
But when people thank me for being vulnerable, I know they are not thanking me for weakness. There is a difference between powerlessness and choosing to drop your guard. Indeed, when we thank someone for their vulnerability, we are often thanking them for a kind of strength: the strength of honesty, of an openness in the name of truth. We are thanking them for their courage.
I think this is why I sometimes question how worthy I am of the compliment. I don’t often feel brave when I write; I feel compelled to put my thoughts into words. It feels less like a virtue exercised and more like a necessity met. I write because I need to speak some truth I can no longer suppress.
I believe most artists would explain their art in a similar way—a kind of unburdening, some deep human need revealed in the striving for beauty.
This is not to say that art—the act of writing itself—is easy. The work I am most proud of (not always but often the work most complimented) is usually the work that demanded the most from me, each sentence a painstaking unraveling.
So perhaps this is part of what we compliment when we thank someone’s vulnerability: Not just their bravery but the effort it entailed, the emotional (and sometimes physical) toll.
Sometimes, I fear our culture commends vulnerability too much. On social media, people post videos of themselves crying over heartbreaks and humiliations, sharing their intimate grief with strangers across the world. There is a kind of exhibitionist nature to this vulnerability, the artifice of it never entirely escapable. I can’t help imagining how the person filming themselves had to take the time to set up the camera while they were crying, and then had to expend the effort to edit the video before posting it. What is presented as raw human emotion is actually a curated bid for attention.
As a writer using a social media platform to share her thoughts, perhaps I don’t have the right to criticize curated bids for attention. Part of what makes anything on social media “vulnerable” is the openness to interpretation. When we share something online, we are leaving ourselves exposed to criticism and misunderstanding. We share in an attempt for connection, but I cannot be entirely convinced that a screen provides true connection anymore than it allows virtuous vulnerability.
I am attempting to define a vulnerability that is virtuous. In the face of artificial intelligence encroaching upon every part of our lives, human vulnerability seems the touchstone of art, the thing that perhaps allows us to define it as such. A computer or a robot can never be vulnerable in the way that commands our respect, that moves us because we see in it the best and worst of ourselves.
So perhaps this is what we mean when we compliment vulnerability in art: an honesty that is personal but not self-serving, striving instead for some universal truth that can only be achieved when one person drops her defenses, revealing her humanness, her brokenness alongside her strengths. When another person can see himself in the revelation, it then becomes a mirror for the whole of humanity.
A virtuous vulnerability, then, both entails and enables compassion.
Brené Brown defines vulnerability in a similar way, seeing it as the benchmark of human connection. While vulnerability leaves us open to criticism, heartbreak, shame, and pain, it is also the only thing that can truly allow us to experience fulfillment, love, and joy. This TED talk is fourteen years old, but it’s still incredibly timely.
In the novel Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout, Tyler Caskey is a widowed minister struggling to lead his parish in the midst of his personal grief. As the novel unfolds, his congregation begins to doubt his abilities as a minister, with small-town rumors growing out of anger and distrust. Toward the end of the novel, having become aware of the gossip, Tyler writes a sermon to castigate his congregation for their “infantile grandiosity.” Full of anger, he rises to the pulpit to preach, only to find himself unable to speak. Rather, seeing the well-known faces of the churchgoers, his anger gives way to his grief and, before his entire congregation, he begins to weep. The narrator describes it with a straightforward tenderness: “He did not hide his face; it did not occur to him to do so.”
And it is this honest display of grief, this vulnerability that he could no longer contain, that ultimately moves his parishioners. Describing one of the instigators of the gossip, the novel reads, “The minute she had seen Tyler Caskey begin to weep, she understood without words forming inside her that her angry thoughts and assumptions about his character had simply not been true.”
At first, Tyler is ashamed of his outburst and believes he should resign, but the novel beautifully reveals how it is precisely his vulnerability that not only prompts the compassion of the town but also allows him to grieve properly, to become a better minister, to rediscover joy.
The novel is a wonder in that the vulnerability of these fictional characters urges us to look more closely at ourselves, to discover compassion for the real people (flawed as they are) around us. The novel is a work of art in the truest sense.
Sometimes, I get nervous about sharing my writing. When someone in the “real world” tells me they read my Substack, I’m always a little bit in shock. I tell them thank you, and I really do mean it. Not just because of the vulnerability writing entails, but also because there is a kind of vulnerability in reading. You are giving me your time and attention, an almost miraculous gift in our fast-paced age of warred-upon attention spans. In the five minutes it’s taken you to read this, you have lent me your thoughts, which is to say yourself. You’ve let down your guard enough to take in my meandering attempts at meaning-making.
I couldn’t be more grateful.
Another beautiful essay, Alexa! Such profound insights on the nature of vulnerability that deftly navigates some of the more daunting edge cases regarding this virtue. Keep sharing the light of truth through your words. Also, I can't wait to read this novel by Strout.