Vulnerability Sucks Part One: No Gold Stars

WRITTEN BY Amanda Gross

Don’t believe what they tell you about vulnerability.

Vulnerability is not all rainbows and butterflies and puppy dogs and rain drops on roses. Vulnerability sucks. It is miserable. It is painful.

Recently (as in over the past 18 months) Brené Brown’s name keeps coming up. Have you seen her Ted Talk? they say. Have you read her books? Isn’t her work on courage and vulnerability amazing? Eye-opening? Brilliant?

Gratitude 2 by Amanda K Gross

I watch the Ted Talk. Why, yes it is all of those things. She honestly and with confidence and humor throws down like a white lady about how courage is whole-heartedness, running with open arms towards the unknown, embracing the life lessons and living to the fullest in ways that people who hold back won’t, can’t ever know. She shares that living in that way is where worthiness and resiliency come from. When I heard her Ted Talk for the first 3 times I left feeling positive, encouraged, inspired to live whole-heartedly, to run towards the love/pain/relationships/experiences with my arms wide open and my heart exposed. I interpreted it as both affirmation and confirmation that I was on the right path of choosing vulnerability. Life is hard, but hard is necessary to develop my self-worth. (Her fabulous talk is way more complex than this above paragraph. I highly recommend watching it for yourself.)

In my eagerness to embrace these challenges, I missed something in the fine print.

What my most recent life lessons have shown, is that vulnerability is less like running arms wide open towards the unknown, and more like running with arms wide open towards a meat grinder. You will be shredded to pieces and then reformed over and over again. And it is no picnic. Or maybe it is a picnic in the middle of a rain storm on a cold early April day in a very gray city with poor air quality.

As I strip off the layers of protective gear to expose it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and in relationship offer it all up to other human beings, the clincher is that the other human beings get to decide to accept or reject it all. It’s not even a one-off toe stub, it’s chronic pain in and out, a constant as long as the relationship lasts and the ripple effect even after it’s over. The deeper the relationship, the more ugly is exposed and the less I can deceive myself about how much of life is under my control. (An illusion I was fed daily in the forms of three square meals, gold stars, good grades, and board games.)

Last week I went home to Atlanta* to reconcile with my past (as if reconciling is a one-off toe stub and not a life-long endeavor). I went home to avoid avoidance and find some sort of balance between the urge to run away from my father kicking and screaming rejecting his right-wing conservative Christian Trump-victorious fixedness and the other urge to fling myself whole-heartedly on the altar of martyred righteousness and exhaustion.

Gratitude 1 by Amanda K Gross

What transpired was both the same and different. In many ways we had the same conversation we’ve always had, the same stand-off with worldviews that won’t coexist, the same pain, the same heart-yearning for relationship and the same stubborn self-preservation. But this time I saw something new.

Honesty and integrity reappear as themes in my paternal lineage. My dad touted these virtues at his dad’s funeral. There are allowances for crudeness, being tactless, blunt, cold, and inconsiderate as long as you are honest. I even made the mistake of claiming this honesty trait for myself once and ever since the Universe has held up her piercing mirror so that I could see for myself if that is indeed the case.

And even though there is a level of dishonesty in the form of denial permeating my father’s cognitive dissonance, I heard his truth clearer than ever before. He was brutally honest in his allegiance to whiteness. He put the good, the bad, and the ugly unapolegetically on display. He did not mince words in saying what his worldview was and in saying that he isn’t (ever) willing to change or challenge it. The only relationship that matters to him and the one that subsumes every single other one – including the one with me – is his relationship with Jesus. He knows he is flawed, yet he will not be moved, not by his heart and certainly not by me.

In this unexpected plot twist, he is actually modeling for me the very vulnerability I say I’m striving for. He is honest in who he is. He knows it and he shows it and he is consistent with his desire to stay on top as a white man, to maintain this power and illusion of power at all costs. Take him or leave him. It made me think of the U.S. presidency. The beauty of Trump is the full exposure of ugliness so that it is also not separate from our own ugliness. It is our ugliness. It is my ugliness, exposed. What does the Trump inside of me look like? Many of the things that piss me off about my dad are personality traits that we have in common.**

Gratitude 3 by Amanda K Gross

Turns out there are no gold stars or A+s at the end of the rainbow. And – this is a lesson I haven’t fully learned yet – trying harder to do better does not necessarily result in doing better or even doing differently. (Again I attribute this to gold stars, good grades, and board games.) Baring one’s own vulnerability does not necessarily roll out the welcome mat of acceptance.

Except maybe of one’s Self.

 

 

*A shoutout to my sister for accompanying me and helping to balance out the hard conversations by teaching me how to enjoy life anyway.

 

**Whiteness has always been used to buy off the masses. Our denial flows even as the stark ugliness is revealed (over and over again). As long as Trump was a candidate, we could seek solace by being his opposition. We knew we were different and better because we weren’t him. But the hard truth is that Trump is and always has been within each of us who have come to be called white. Accepting that reality with courage and seeking is a powerful place to start to stand for your own and our own collective freedom. Accepting that reality is confronting fear and triumphing in a greater love.

A Season for Witch Hunts

written by AMANDA GROSS

Tis the season.

Centuries before White Ladies began selling our souls to Whiteness we were fighting our living death in Patriarchy, in our own communities and in our own homes.

Wooden Frame; Mixed Media by Amanda K Gross

The witch hunts of Europe spanned 15th-18th Centuries and targeted at least tens of thousands of women* and men and even children (some estimates reach into the millions). While the Roman Catholic Church was defending its political and economic base in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, the social purging of those accused of witchcraft was something both Christian sects enthusiastically agreed on. Rooting out evil, the witch became the criminal of the day, a convenient scapegoat whose tortures, trials, and burnings fueled religious, political, and social institutions. Priests and ministers were back in demand, called in desperation to exorcise the demons. New courts were established, expert judges and attorneys were required to legitimize fear and its antidote – law and order.** Mayors and other leaders vowed to purify their towns, platforming off of the fear, suspicion, and subsequent hatred.

Sound familiar?

Neighbors testified against neighbors, against the very women who had served as midwives at their births.*** We told on each other. We took our unchecked personal vendettas straight to the ears of those who could do us harm. We whispered our dissatisfactions and accusations and they traveled. The negativity and rumors repeated and mutated, feeding into the hands of the men in power, who inflicted institutionalized terror in God’s name and then washed their hands of any responsibility. Some of the dead were buried. Others burned.

This is our history too.

In The Witch in the Western Imagination, Lyndal Roper describes how one common person accused of witchcraft made the mistake of marrying into royalty. Agnes, the wife of the Duke of Bavaria, was ultimately drowned by her father-in-law in order to keep a class structure in place. Her marriage dared to assert “that the honor of the citizen town dweller as equal to that of the nobel.” Gold digger! This violent enforcement of class divide an inspirational predecessor to anti-miscegynation laws soon to come in the colonies of North America?

His & Hers, by Amanda K Gross

And this projected envy appears thematically throughout this gruesome history. Roper writes, “The theme of envy emerges time and time again in witchcraft… [the symbol of the witch] could represent Envy, evoke the evils of feminine allure, horrify with her murderous violence against children and kin…”. Neighbors told on neighbors. Friends insinuated about former friends. Children outed parents. And while we know European society in general was not all about raising women up in equality, as a collective group we played right into their hands. It was the betrayal we did to each other and ultimately to ourselves that gave the enemy their proof. It is the betrayal to ourselves and to each other today that keeps the web of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy strong.

We still do this all the time. We gravitate to the witch hunt, a toxic coping mechanism to purge ourselves of imperfection, wrongdoing, and responsibility. We project envy onto others and fuel our own fear. They must want what we have. As long as the enemy is The Other then it can’t be us. Except, this world is set up so that we are an other. White women have been bought off by whiteness so that we no longer think we are The Other. We have fooled ourselves into believing that our right to play the whiteness game protects us from misogyny, that the material benefits of a home security system in a “safe” neighborhood will protect us from the rape culture within, that the intellectual benefits of academic degrees and selling our minds for profit is superior to selling our bodies to survive.

Domesticated Installation, by Amanda K Gross

But deep down, under the veil of whiteness, these systems are not for us either. They never were. A lineage that stems from the great Patriarch Abraham, we learned to hate ourselves even before in the Garden of Eden. Our creation story punishes our innate yearning for knowledge. The knowledge of ourselves. The knowledge of the feminine divine. When we know that we too are holy, that we are holy just because we are, then we will no longer consent to our own harm. When we have a sense of our own life-affirming power, we will no longer need to feed off of the power frenzy of the witch hunt. When we love and affirm ourselves, we will stop wasting our energy disorganizing against ourselves and begin organizing for our humanity and collective liberation.

Perhaps most powerful are Roper’s words on “the witch as a symbolic necessity.” In these European political systems built on Patriarchy, “women’s political action proved conclusive that order was overturned.” Which begs the question, what is the order that we are willing to overturn?

 

*Approximately 3/4ths of those accused of witchcraft were women and were largely accused of crimes against human and agriculture fertility.

**Roper writes that attorneys began to make “a fortune in legal consultations…” and established a lucrative system in “housing and feeding the children, and paying guards to watch over them.” The roots of our U.S. juvenile justice system are not so difficult to trace.

***As Roper writes, “…themes of witches causing miscarriages were ironic as witches [as midwives] were often responsible for the health of pregnancy and birth.”  The control of labor here takes on multiple layers of meaning.