There’s something so vulnerable about hands. You can tell a lot about someone’s life through their hands. This could be dramatic, or odd, but it’s true you can tell a lot about someone by their hands, and there’s something so vulnerable about that reflection.
The thing is: we share our hands with everyone, but we fall short in sharing our vulnerabilities. Vulnerability is, well, vulnerable. It’s uncomfortable and I would rather throw a temper tantrum than deal with it.
It’s so much easier to hide away than face the truth of a lot of things, and it’s easy to avoid feelings and emotions at all costs because those are vulnerable. We all have been tailored to believe that vulnerability is a weakness.
Millennial News Flash: It’s not.
It’s actually quite the opposite. Vulnerability is a courageous act of sharing your deepest, darkest, and ugliest parts of yourself and facing them, fixing them, or accepting them. And there’s nothing scarier than that.
You’re brave if you’re afraid of something and go for it, or admit it, anyway. It’s the comfortability which bothers us that causes us to grow. It’s the scariest things that cause growth. And it’s the act of being vulnerable that opens us up to grow into who we are supposed to be.
And maybe that’s the most frightening about vulnerability. If we show who we truly are then will we grow weaker? Will it break us?
Being emotionally sensitive is nothing to be embarrassed about –it’s the sensitivity that maintains our vulnerability. There’s a lot of things in the world that will make you feel unnecessarily small, and bitter, but it takes bravery and vulnerability to be soft in the moments that are meant to make us hard.
Sensitivity isn't a weakness; if anything, if you allow yourself to have the opportunity to be heartbroken, that's bravery.
We don't always wear our hearts on our sleeves or hold them in our hands. And I'm not saying that the world would be a better place if we did, but maybe we would be stronger people if we did that.
If we held our hearts in the hands that we've used to build walls around our hearts then maybe we wouldn't have such a pressure to fake wholeness in our moments of brokenness.