There’s a scene from last season of “This is Us” where Kevin, who has ended up in rehab, returns to his room after an intense family counseling session and his mom, Rebecca, is sitting in there waiting for him. She tells him about this memory she has of him and his sibling’s being dropped off for their first day of kindergarten and how while his brother and sister were crying and clinging to her, Kevin just walked right into the class and never looked back. Then she looks at him and says, “I never worried about you. I never worried about you because I never thought I had to”. I remember watching that scene and crying my eyes out. Something about those words in particular so strongly stood out to me.
Now flash forward to last week in my own life, and here I am having a pretty vulnerable conversation about how while there are some issues in my life that I have been struggling with for a while now, I doubt any of my friends or family would ever say so or even think that it is true. I am not really sure what I expected the response to be, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the person on the other end of that conversation to say something along the lines of “of course not! Why would they? You’ve clearly worked very hard never to give them a reason to worry about you”. Suddenly, at that moment, Rebecca’s words to Kevin came flooding back to me, knocking the air right out of my lungs… “I never worried about you because I never thought I had to.”
It’s become increasingly clear to me over the past several months how ridiculously hard I work to portray this persona to the world that I am fine, while the whole time I am slowly dying inside. That sounds so intense, this idea of slowly dying inside, but I think it explains it perfectly. Somewhere along the line in life, I picked up this belief that I shouldn’t be real with people about my struggles. And that if I were real, people would reject me. I guess all of us believe that lie to some extent, but I recognize now that I’ve believed it so much so that I’ve insolated myself from even the possibility of letting that happen. I don’t let people in. I don’t let them see behind the mask. And in the few times that I have allowed people look behind the curtain, I have immediately pushed them out, runway, or in some manner stopped connecting with them, as sort of an “I’m going to reject you before you can reject me” response. I know in some way I am doing this because I think I am protecting myself, but really all I’m actually doing is forcing people out of my life and reaffirming the false idea that if people really knew me, they would reject me. I’m not being fair… not to myself and certainly not to others
This was all so clear to me as I sat in church this morning. At my church we are in the midst of a sermon series on community and today’s sermon was all about vulnerability. I can’t say that anything that was spoken today was something I hadn’t heard before. It’s all things I know…but the visual illustration our pastor gave of a person in a straitjacket protected from the world but also unable to receive love or care or even concern, really brought the point home for me. I need to open up.
The thing is though, being vulnerable is not something I do well. It’s not something I really do at all. Yet over the past few months, weeks, and days, I have felt a sense of urgency in me like… now is time. I can either choose to be vulnerable and walk out of the self-made prison cell I have been living in or succumb to the fact that this is just the way life is and how it will stay until I die. I want better for myself. I desire more from my life. And while it’s scary to even post this, knowing I will actually see and interact with some of the people who will read it, I know it’s a step I need to take, because the truth is, I do believe it’s worth it to be vulnerable…now I just have to live it.
