At first, when I entertain the question "where do I want to be?" my response is invariably Paris. Paris in the cold. Paris in the blistering, un-air-conditioned, sweaty, sticky heat. Paris on a gray day. Paris on a delicately warm and breezy sun-danced day. Paris in all its devastating, riotous, glory. No lover of Paris can know of the mayhem occurring right now and not experience absolute heartbreak for her fierce beauty. I miss her. Even so, if I gave this response to the question posed, I would be missing the reality and soul of it. Yes, I want to be in Paris, but that is not the intent of the question. The question begs for more.

Truthfully, I am a driven individual and I thrive on each and every success. I feed off of them. So what happens when I have a season like the one of late, the one of this past semester, when I seem to be stumbling at every corner? The choice of floundering and allowing failure to break me is never, has never been, and will never be an option for me. Failure happens, sure. Fine. I have fallen short in so many ways in my life and I'm slowly but surely learning to accept the naturality of it. It is okay to not want to fail, and I would hope that I would crave more than failure. What isn't okay by me, however, is being afraid of it, and if I'm being sincere with myself, this entire semester I have been going about utterly terrified.

If you are being honest with yourself, you probably do, too.

Taking a holistic picture of who I am, I am at my core a person who loves to love. Nothing brings me more joy than knowing that my life is bringing joy to another. Farther out, though, I am frightened by the tone of vulnerability. Being vulnerable is supposed to mean you are weak, right? By definition, vulnerability means "capable or susceptible of being wounded or hurt; open to moral attack, temptation, criticism, etc." In what world would anybody want to be open to attack? What is so enticing about that? For quite some time now, I have admired the work of Dr. Brené Brown. She has studied concepts of shame and vulnerability extensively and her findings have greatly impacted the way I carry on with life. According to her, the "inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limit(s) the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few." She claims the opposite of the lies my subconscious sends my way. She claims that being vulnerable actually makes me the strongest of all.

What Dr. Brené Brown claims is true, as is the dictionary definition. Vulnerability does indeed make me an open target for failure and rejection, and at the same time, it also makes me an open gate for belonging and trust. This means, that if I want to love other people, I, too, need to learn to accept and be open to others. For me, fear can showcase itself in statements like "no worries!" when something actually did bother me, or in behaviors such as having multiple partners not because I'm seeking attention or am incapable of connecting deeply with my these individuals, but because entering into a single relationship means that rejection could happen and would hurt that much more if I were only with one person. In all this, I do trust my partners, value them for who they are, and am able to be my genuine self with them.

As these past months have unfolded, fear has been revealed to me not only in this fear of rejection, but also in a fear of losing control to the point it is now glaringly obvious to me just how much I go out of my way to make sure I maintain my hand over my life. I have been aware of the strength of my fear of failure for some time now, but with recent manifestations of it appearing in my life, it is now impossible to merely pick away at it bit by bit. I have to attack it full force. Faith is helping me to do so, but it is a work in progress for sure.

So then, where do I want to be? The answer is I don't know where exactly. What I do know now, though, is that I want to defy my fears by being the most vulnerable person I know in 2019. And that? That's gutsy as hell.