The Power Of Vulnerability!
You don’t have to face it alone anymore - 7/30
Welcome to Raw Journal, your newsletter for all things healing, personal development, and faith. It’s always a pleasure to have you here.
We’re adults now, people are busy, I don’t want to bother anyone, they have enough on their plate.
I don’t know how often you’ve wanted to reach out to someone but didn’t know who to talk to. Or the times you wanted to share what you were going through but minimised it because someone was going through worse.
Or when you’ve been amongst friends and wanted to say how you really feel but chose the easier response.
The surface level one where you’ve said something but haven’t touched how hard things are for you.
How often do we make it hard for the people in our lives to be there for us?
During my teenage years, my church had a women’s fellowship. We met to discuss different topics. There was a moment where each person in the room began to open up about a specific discussion point.
I was so taken aback that when it was my turn, I shook my head implying I had no intention of sharing anything about me. A dense silence filled the room before it moved to the person beside me.
At the time, the idea of being vulnerable in any area of my life was unfamiliar to me. If anything occurred, my natural inclination was to internalise, journal, or suppress altogether.
To share my mind or heart out loud, so it could be heard and received by someone else was extremely uncomfortable.
These thoughts drove my reservations on vulnerability at the time:
Being vulnerable makes you weak.
If someone knows your weakness, they can take advantage of you.
No one can do anything about the things I really want to share, so why share it.
I don’t want anyone to know me like that.
The underlying emotion behind every thought was fear.
If I restrict what you know about me, I can control how close you are to me. If I control how close you are, then you can’t hurt me either.
I thought it was a boundary to keep me safe, but it was an invisible wall keeping the people in my life at arm's length. It also prevented people from getting to know me altogether.
It was a wall contributing to a deep sense of loneliness. The type of loneliness where you have people around you, but don’t feel known or understood.
I often felt out of place and couldn’t be known as I wanted to, if I didn’t give people a chance to understand who I was and what made me, me.
A mentor said to me once:
You’ve isolated yourself from being open and connected to people. Nobody will ever know the depths of your heart. They’ll know the breadth but not the true depths. In other words, they’ll know different things about you, but they won’t know the fullness, intensity and density of the things about you.
To come out of my shell, I needed to be vulnerable with the people in my life. I had to share my fears, insecurities, weaknesses, and struggles.
It felt easier to speak and share after the fact. To say, “This is what happened or this is what I’ve overcome.”
It’s quite different when you give access to yourself in real-time. When the testimony isn’t complete, when it’s the middle of a journey, or when you don’t know when you’ll come out on the other side of a thing.
I’ve had a number of uncomfortable conversations over the years and shared things I would rather keep to myself or reserve for a therapist.
I often said: “Healing is so lonely” and to a degree, it’s your life and no one can heal for you but it doesn’t have to be done alone. I chose to let my guard down and allowed close friends, mentors, and church leaders to know me deeper.
I let myself be seen. Little by little. Layer by layer.
We all have blind spots and people can’t cover us in the areas we hide from them.
So, as I unveiled more layers in my healing process, I learned to take people with me. I thank God for His provision in my life through community. I prayed for this and with time, individual by individual, I saw how God was placing and positioning people in my life.
And it was my responsibility to actually let them in. I had to be proactive. I couldn’t wait for people to read my mind or push or probe, it was up to me to be vulnerable.
When I consider the moments where I struggled alone or suffered in silence, compared to when I’ve taken people with me, there’s a major difference.
Endurance is easier when not done alone. Events and circumstances can still be challenging yes, but it’s made easier when done with other people.
Any encouragement to be vulnerable should be done with wisdom amongst those who’ve earned your trust and whose character you can vouch for. This doesn’t mean people will be perfect, sometimes we don’t always have the ‘right words’ to say.
There’ll be times where you may have overshared to the wrong person and that’s okay. Be kind and compassionate to yourself, learn from those experiences and don’t allow it to hinder you from sharing with the right ones.
And to actually know the right people, it does come from trial and error which can feel so risky but we must give people a chance to be there for us. We won’t really know who can be there until we give them a go.
Benefits of being Vulnerable:
It takes you out of a place of isolation and loneliness.
People know how to support you where you need it most.
It provides a place of safety.
Sharing aloud helps you to take stock of where you actually are.
With what you’re currently navigating, who can you call, message, or send a voice note to? Does anyone know how hard things are for you? The pressures you face, the weight of it all.
You don’t have to face it alone, you can share the burden with someone else. Let people be there for you, it doesn’t have to be so lonely anymore. If there’s one thing I know, God sometimes answers our prayers through people. Look around you and don’t resist the support or help He may have already sent your way!
Love RJ x
Journal Prompts:
Who can I be more vulnerable with?
Who is strong in an area I currently feel weak in?
What does it look like for me to lean into community in this time?
Bible Verses for Meditation and Prayer:
✨‘Where there is no counsel, the people fall; but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.’ - Proverbs 11:14 (NKJV)
✨‘Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, For he has no one to help him up.’ - Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (NKJV)
✨‘Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.’ - Galatians 6:2 (NKJV)
✨‘Now we exhort you, brethren, warn those who are unruly, comfort the fainthearted, uphold the weak, be patient with all. See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone, but always pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.’ - 1 Thessalonians 5:14-15 (NKJV)