lee is writing an essay on vulnerabilities

Vulnerability to Anxiety

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Researchers believe that anybody can experience a bout of debilitating anxiety. But some people seem to be dispositionally inclined to anxiety: Their defense systems—possibly tuned by genes or temperament, possibly by early experience, possibly by over- or underactivity of some area of the brain—are poised to over-interpret neutral situations as threatening or to overreact to threatening situations.

On This Page

• What role do genes play in anxiety?
• Are there biological traits that make people vulnerable to anxiety?
• How does childhood adversity create vulnerability to anxiety?
• How does stress affect anxiety?
• Do neurotransmitters play a role in anxiety?
• How does anxiety start?
• How does the anxious brain differ from the normal brain?
• Is it possible to rewire the anxious brain with talk therapy?

It is not clear how much of a role genetics plays in causing excessive anxiety. Studies show that children with anxiety disorders are twice as likely as other children to have parents with anxiety disorders; but it’s an open question whether such findings reflect biological or environmental transmission. Parental anxiety could be shaping parenting style in a way that contributes to development of anxiety disorders in the young.

Some studies have shown that variations of genes linked to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis may create susceptibility to anxiety disorders . This is the system that regulates the fight-or-flight stress response by activating the sympathetic nerve in the face of threat. Overexcitability of any element in the stress response system, as well as shifts in activity of various neurochemicals in the brain and diminished efficiency of nerve circuitry and nerve generation—all play a role in anxiety.

The expression and function of genes can be altered without any changes to the gene structure itself. Such changes, known as epigenetic modifications , can occur as a result of life experiences to create vulnerability to anxiety. For example, in rat pups, lack of maternal care can permanently reset the sensitivity of receptors to stress hormones. If their mothers fail to lick and groom them, the pups grow up to display an exaggerated response to stress hormones and develop psychopathology in response to stress. There is a great deal of evidence that among humans, certain kinds of adverse childhood experience—such as repeated child abuse or neglect—can have a lasting impact on the function of genes (such as those that activate the stress system) to increase the risk of anxiety later on.

There is a temperament seen in a significant percentage of children—as many as 20 percent— that is related to later development of anxiety. Behavioral inhibition shows up early in childhood, as heightened negative reactivity and heightened attention to and wariness of unfamiliar people and situations. It may also involve heightened awareness of internal body states. It makes toddlers and children overly fearful and clingy.

Studies show that behavioral inhibition involves a bias of attention networks in the brain towards threat and away from positive information. While attentional bias toward threat may be the way the nervous system is initially tuned in such infants, that tuning isn’t necessarily fixed. In fact, research indicates that attention is amenable to moderation, and parents may play a big role in shaping it . For example, parents who constantly point out dangers to their children may unwittingly reinforce the attentional bias to threat. Children who learn to flexibly shift their attention from distress may be less in thrall to the attentional bias and less likely to develop anxiety. The evidence indicates that the temperament of behavioral inhibition may make children vulnerable to anxiety but it alone does not mandate its development.

Severe or sustained early life adversity shifts the course of brain development and can lastingly impair emotion regulation and cognitive development. Excessive or prolonged activation of the stress response in childhood, studies show, can sensitize the brain so that it is constantly on the lookout for danger and overresponds to minimal levels of danger. Such brain changes are an attempt at protection—adaptations aimed at promoting safety in dangerous environments. But once children grow up and move out of their early environment, those brain changes remain and can make them feel easily threatened by life’s ordinary challenges. Severe or prolonged childhood adversity has been shown to affect the function of genes important for the wiring of the brain, so that emotional control is difficult—overproducing neural connections in regions such as the amygdala that signal threat and other negative emotions while underendowing neural connectivity in brain areas responsible for behavioral control, reasoning, and planning.

Such rigging of emotion processing circuits leads to heightened emotional reactivity, lack of emotional awareness, and reliance on maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as rumination and worry. The types of negative childhood experience that give rise to later anxiety include negative family atmosphere; physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; loss of a parent of other loved one; social difficulties; and school experiences such as bullying. Nevertheless, adult brains retain the capacity for neuroplasticity. Although it takes effort, and often the guidance of psychotherapy, people can learn to overcome many of the ill effects of early adversity.

Stress and anxiety overlap in many ways; both are survival strategies that share many psychological and physical action s. Stress can both set off anxiety and be a response to it. Stress can be beneficial to the brain, depending on how intense and long-lasting the stressor is. In brief bursts, stress is a signal to prepare body and brain to adapt to new challenges and circumstances. It fosters alertness and fast learning. Severe or prolonged stress, however, can disrupt many aspects of brain function.

Overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol is especially disruptive to cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center and a key station in the circuitry of anxiety: It is the role of the hippocampus to put into context the signals of threat emanating from an emotionally screaming amygdala so that the prefrontal cortex can decide on the appropriate response. Stress constrains the hippocampus. Sustained stress can also overactivate the amygdala so that it relentlessly sends out signals of alarm that overpower the ability of the prefrontal cortex to subdue them, the source of so much human distress.

The neurotransmitters GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) and glutamate, which act largely as opposing forces in the brain— glutamate stimulating the firing of nerve cells and GABA dampening it —are increasingly thought to play significant roles in anxiety. Many lines of evidence indicate that anxiety arises from some disturbance of the brain circuits that regulate the emotional response to potentially threatening stimuli. Through the normal channels of circuitry connecting the emotion-stoking amygdala and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), epicenter of the rational, planning brain, there is constant communication balancing inhibitory and excitatory signals. Both GABA and glutamate are involved in that circuitry.

In anxiety, the PFC is outgunned by the amygdala. Likely brought about by the hormones of stress, GABA receptors that normally keep the amygdala in line undergo changes so that it becomes hyperactive in sending out signals of alarm. Stress may also affect glutamate in such a way to keep the PFC from its normal task of modulating the emotional output of the amygdala. Researchers find that in a specific channel of one-way signaling from the PFC to the amygdala, stress stimulates release of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate and shifts the balance of signals transmitted by the PFC towards excitatory signals. The emotional alarm signals emanating from the hyperactivated amygdala, amplified by the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate, shut down specific groups of nerve cells in the PFC, thereby shutting down the possibility of regulating amygdala hyperactivity. Anxiety reigns.

Anxiety, as well as its older relative fear, is set off by a signal from the amygdala, an ancient part of the brain. It processes emotion-related stimuli and sends out signals that ultimately beget a behavioral response. Fear is the response to an immediate danger. Anxiety, a more cerebral and subjective state, results when the amygdala perceives a vague threat or faces the possibility of an unwanted outcome to a future event. It is dominated by the element of uncertainty.

The amygdala—actually, there are two, and they are tiny, almond-shaped structures, one each in the right and left temporal lobe—is often called “the fear center” of the brain, and it does flag fearful stimuli. But it also plays a role in many other emotions and is a notable participant in pain perception and behavioral aggression. The size of the amygdala, its degree of connectivity to other parts of the brain—stress may boost its connections—and its threshold of activation may naturally vary among people, predisposing to anxiety those with a large amygdala, or stronger connectivity, or with a low threshold of activation, even in the absence of a threat. Beyond the amygdala, fear and anxiety share much of the same brain circuitry.

There are a number of ways the anxious brain differs from the normal brain, and while this is very much an ongoing area of research, scientists know this much: The prefrontal cortex (PFC), epicenter of the rational, planning brain, is outgunned by the emotion-stoking amygdala. Through the normal channels of circuitry connecting the amygdala and PFC, there is constant communication balancing inhibitory and excitatory signals between the two centers.

But in a particular channel of one way signaling from the PFC to the amygdala, stress stimulates release of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate at synapses and shifts the balance of signals transmitted by the PFC towards excitatory signals, dysregulating cortical control over the amygdala and leading to anxiety. The excitatory signals dampen the ability of the PFC to suppress amygdala activity and output, paving the way not only for anxiety but for other stress-related emotional and behavioral disorders. In addition, the anxious brain loses neuroplasticity. There is a failure of neurogenesis—the ability to generate new nerve cell connections—in the hippocampus.

Throughout life, the brain is always rewiring itself in response to experience. Every time you see, hear, smell, or touch something, learn a new fact, or have a new experience, genes are activated in the brain, new proteins are synthesized, new neural pathways are forged, and they communicate the new information to multiple brain regions . This capacity of the brain is known as neuroplasticity.

It is possible to stimulate and target the brain’s rewiring, and that is what psychotherapy does—think of psychotherapy as a highly focused experience of education. Brain imaging studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy—the first-line treatment for most forms of anxiety and depression— lastingly alters the structure and function of the brain, both curbing activation of the amygdala in response to threatening stimuli and fortifying the prefrontal cortex so that it exerts neural control over the emotion-charged amygdala. Talk therapy takes aim at anxiety by exposing the irrationality of most worries and equipping people to see through their worries so that they are not ruled by them..

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Why Vulnerability is Key in Your Personal Statement

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Kaila Barber in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

• The Goal of the Personal Statement

Why is Showing Vulnerability Important?

How to tell if you’ve been vulnerable in your essay.

The Goal of the Personal Statement 

The main goal of your personal statement essay is to show the reader how unique and interesting you are. Your essays are how the admissions officers find out the kind of student you would be on their campus and how you’re going to fit in with their community. This is your chance to show the admission office who you are, especially the things that  don’t show up on paper. If you have an interesting hobby, or there’s something about you that really stands out, this is the place you want to try and include that in your college application. 

Outstanding personal statements that really wow colleges usually are about, or include aspects of, one of four common topics. These are vulnerability, values, insight, and craft. 

Vulnerability is useful to show in your essay because it makes your writing feel personal and genuine. Your personal statement is called your personal statement for a reason, so you should make it personal. 

If you had to write right now and say what vulnerability, or being vulnerable, means to you, what would you say? What have you noticed about those around you when they’re being vulnerable? Ask yourself about what you feel when you’re vulnerable. These are great questions to think about before you begin writing. This kind of self-reflection is especially important for writing personal statements.  

Showing vulnerability in your essay demonstrates your ability to connect to another person on an emotional level, sharing feelings and morals. That is a trait that you can use to make the reader feel more connected to you and invested in being part of your success. This doesn’t mean that you have to write about your deepest and darkest secrets inside your essay, but your essay should be a little bit personal. This means being open and expressing your true emotions and thoughts. 

You might be asking yourself, how do I know if I’m displaying vulnerability? A great way to test this is if your essay is personal and unique enough then if you put this essay on someone else’s application it won’t work for them. There are a lot of students who are in similar extracurriculars, so you have to make sure your essay is unique enough to not fit a student who does similar activities to you. If your essay would fit for other students, then you’re not being specific enough. 

When you’re vulnerable enough and include enough detail about yourself, your reader is going to read your essay and feel more of a connection with you because they are getting a better understanding of who you are. This understanding will go beyond your AP or test scores, or any other number on your application. You want your readers to see you as a person to whom they feel connected. Always keep this in mind when you’re brainstorming your personal essay and how best you can display vulnerability.

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Vulnerability is Strength

The most important thing writing has taught me is this: the more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become. It sounds counter-intuitive, I know. It sounds like bullshit. Here’s the thing: you can’t change the past, but if you can face it, both the present and the future will shift. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than wasting your energy keeping something underground. When you drag the shameful thing out of the dark, its power lessens. It is finite. It has edges. You look at it in the light, and in the light you write it down, and in the writing you may find a way to forgive yourself, and in the telling you grow stronger because you have made something new out of it, you have given it shape and meaning.

So when you write about your life, don’t skip over the hard parts. What would be the point? Who would you be fooling? Yourself? Oh please. I learned this the hard way, so stricken with shame that I needed to find a way out. My husband was hit by a car, and he was left with a traumatic brain injury so severe he could not live at home. He was taken to a facility in upstate New York. Once a week I drove up to see him, but it felt so infrequent and so short were the visits that I sold my apartment in the city and bought a house nearby and slowly I began to put a life together. I made new friends, I had a yard where my dogs could run free, I was writing and teaching. Sometimes I was able to bring my husband home for an afternoon. I began to love my new life. But we have a habit of sabotaging ourselves, especially when things are going well, and one day I asked myself if I could wave a wand and change the past, if I could erase my husband’s tragic accident, would I? of course I would, wouldn’t I? But I hesitated, and what followed was a terrible confusion of sorrow and shame—this new life had been born of my husband’s tragedy.

I needed to write about that shame, hoping for some kind of forgiveness, hoping for clarity, but it was going nowhere. So I did what I always do when confronted by something I can’t put to rest, can’t find words for, can’t bear to know about myself. I took down my Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, because sometimes the DNA of a word answers a question you didn’t know to ask. I looked up shame, and I looked up guilt, but found nothing to enlighten me. Finally I looked up acceptance.  And among the words that acceptance evolved from is one that meant “a thread used in weaving.” And in that moment my whole life changed. I understood. Acceptance. Maybe the thread frays, maybe it breaks, but you have to weave it in and then you have to keep on weaving.

Some years later a woman wrote to tell me she had spent a lifetime overwhelmed by guilt over something she had either done or failed to do, until she came across what I’d written. “I used to feel like the worst person on earth,” she wrote, “and now I just feel human.”  Tell the hard truths, clear your vision, be of use. ___ Abigail Thomas has four children, twelve grandchildren and one great grandchild. She also has two old dogs and a high school education. Her books include Safekeeping ; A Three Dog Life ; What Comes Next and How To Like It . She celebrates her 80 th  birthday this year.

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Introduction: What Is Vulnerability, and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?

• Published: December 2013
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The first section of this introduction identifies four questions that an ethics of vulnerability needs to address: What is vulnerability? Why does vulnerability give rise to moral obligations and duties of justice? Who bears primary responsibility for responding to vulnerability? And, how are our obligations to the vulnerable best fulfilled? It explains how these questions have been addressed in the recent literature on vulnerability in ethics, bioethics, and feminist philosophy, and articulates the central theoretical challenges for an ethics of vulnerability. In addressing the question ‘What is vulnerability?’, the introduction also proposes a distinctive taxonomy of different sources (inherent, situational and pathogenic) and states (dispositional and occurrent) of vulnerability. The second section of the introduction provides an overview of the structure of the volume and a précis of each essay.

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4 The Hidden and Invisible: Vulnerability in Writing Center Work by Lauren Brentnell, Elise Dixon, & Rachel Robinson

Keywords : Vulnerability, emotion, social justice, trauma, identity, embodiment

It’s often uncomfortable to be vulnerable with others, especially within public spaces.

Introduction.

It’s often uncomfortable to be vulnerable with others, especially within public spaces. Witnessing others’ vulnerabilities and being vulnerable ourselves asks us to extend empathy that might make us feel uncomfortable. Further, vulnerability is a privilege not always extended to everyone. As white people, we acknowledge that vulnerability doesn’t look the same for everyone and may even be dangerous for certain populations, such as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Throughout this piece, we consider what Richard Marback means when he says, “vulnerability requires more of us than empathy” (7), and what working with empathetic vulnerability might require of us in the writing center. What does it mean for us, and for more inherently vulnerable populations, to push past empathy into a space of authentic vulnerability? Does this look different in writing centers? As white people, we acknowledge that vulnerability doesn’t look the same for everyone and may even be dangerous for certain populations, such as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Writing centers are often idealized as successful and happy academic spaces ( Grimm ; McKinney ), which contributes to the promulgation of a welcoming facade. However, writing center scholars often know that the concept of welcome is much more complicated and freighted with the emotional labor of consultants and directors ( Caswell et al. ; Dixon & Robinson ).

When the three of us came together to write about being vulnerable in writing center work, we didn’t realize how we each independently approached the writing center space as one that simultaneously welcomes and rejects visible acts of vulnerability, particularly when enacted by tutors, administrators, and staff members. To be clear, writing centers are often described as “caring” spaces that resist traditional impersonal hierarchical structures and welcome vulnerability, but they also tend to be described as academic spaces that prioritize professionalism. Thus, vulnerability should be present in our interactions with clients but also shouldn’t , because we’re professionals . However, painful moments that require—or demand—visible vulnerability are often unpredictable; people do not schedule writing center appointments around these moments. Instead, moments of vulnerability present themselves in the “everyday” of the center: in our conversations, in our sessions, and in the ways we interact with the writing center space itself, and they are, sometimes, not pleasant or “welcome.”

Traditionally, writing centers are marked as comforting spaces, often with touches of “home” like plants, coffee makers, and couches (McKinney). These comforting touches of home (hopefully) help to make the writing center an open, welcoming hangout space for consultants and writers alike. In this space, ordinary moments take place through social interactions but also in the mundane interactions with objects in the center. Gellar et al . call for writing center directors and scholars to “remain open to everyday moments” in the center (56), suggesting readers consider the everyday chats between consultants during their breaks and the meaning made in created and found objects such as magnetic poetry (Figure 1), internet bookmarks, and unshelved books (56). Indeed, they argue that seeing the everyday in these artifacts is one way to uncover what means and what matters in our writing centers” (58).

For us, evidence of vulnerability is present in the objects left behind in the center: in neglected plants left to die on the tables (Figure 2), in the magnetic poetry constructed to describe a client or consultant’s grief or apathy, in the toys and crayons broken and pulled apart after an anxiety-riddled session. Photographs of such evidence of everyday vulnerability are scattered throughout this article and are intended to illuminate how inanimate objects can reveal deep—and sometimes negative—feelings.

Because we—and many of those we work with—have painful, difficult moments on a daily basis, we argue for the importance of discussing, exposing, and integrating vulnerability into our everyday writing center work, even as we know this practice is more difficult for some populations than others.

Marback argues that while we often see vulnerability as something to be hidden or overcome, we should instead reorient to seeing vulnerability “not as a weakness but as a strength, an attitude of care and concern that connects us to the world and to each other” (1). This approach sees vulnerability not as something to be hidden away in order to create a “positive” community space, and not, even, as something everyone gets to choose. Instead, it is something to be safely discussed, even when it is uncomfortable. Vulnerability can help to create a community more attuned to all bodies within it, which is (supposedly) at the core of writing center work. In exposing, discussing, and exploring vulnerabilities, we can begin developing social justice-oriented practices in a writing center .

Throughout this chapter, we interrogate what it means to be vulnerable consultants in the writing center. Vulnerability can feel like a loss of control, an irrational response that makes us ashamed, particularly in the academic spaces where we work and rely heavily on rationality as a guiding principle. Instead, we see vulnerability as “emotional involvement,” which “demands from us an acceptance of greater risk than is demanded by empathy” (Marback 7). While empathy is frequently integrated into our work as writing center consultants, vulnerability demands more. We’re often empathetic to those who come to us for help—we take time to understand their writing, why they are writing, the struggles they are having. But vulnerability asks us to also be forward about our own struggles, which can leave us feeling exposed and uncomfortable in interactions with co-workers and in sessions. We are not calling for everyone to always be vulnerable . Instead, we advocate for allowing space for vulnerabilities not to be seen as shameful when they do come forward at work.

This chapter is presented in three parts. First, Lauren, a former consultant at The Writing Center @ MSU (Michigan State University), discusses the need for care-based responses within the writing center to both spoken and silent vulnerability. Then Elise, former interim assistant director at The Writing Center @ MSU and current writing center director at University of North Carolina at Pembroke,  presents photos she took of objects in MSU’s center that mark consultants’ and writers’ unspoken vulnerabilities. These photos are peppered throughout the chapter to give a sense of the vulnerabilities that people (including ourselves) express within the writing center in non-verbal ways. Next, we have Rachel’s stories. Rachel, former interim assistant director and current graduate coordinator at The Writing Center @ MSU, writes of having to publicly and vulnerably live through her grief while continuing with the important, everyday tasks of writing center work (Figure 3). Finally, we conclude with strategies for creating and discussing vulnerable moments in your own center.

In Lauren’s research with trauma survivors, she advocates for care-based practices in all areas of our work, including research, teaching, writing program administration, and, of course, writing centers. Care-based practices include:

• Prioritizing the building of safe and open communities ( Craig and Perryman-Clark ; Herman ; Yergeau )
• Promoting empathetic listening ( Dolmage ; Laub )
• Reflecting on positionality and relationality ( Cedillo ; Craig and Perryman-Clark; Powell et al. )
• Sharing power and flattening hierarchical governance ( Guarino et al. ; Tuhiwai Smith )
• Rebuilding networks of trust and care through care-based practices (Herman; Morales )

What we’ve learned from this model of care-based practices is that vulnerability is an active practice, one that we have to train both speakers and listeners to handle. Experiencing vulnerability is scary precisely because it is seen as weakness. We often hide our shame, our worry, our anger, our depression, and our grief from others because we fear the risks associated with being open. Likewise, we often fear being taken advantage of, being shunned, or being viewed as “difficult.” Many of us may not have a choice in that vulnerability; certain positionalities including race, sexuality, ability, class, and nationality are inherently more vulnerable than others, so these experiences and feelings may be heightened.

For listeners, vulnerability is scary because we don’t always know how to handle someone else’s pain, particularly when we aren’t trained as counselors. Even empathetic listeners can mess up by responding in seemingly dismissive ways that make vulnerable speakers feel unheard and unimportant. Therefore, engaging in the work of vulnerability means working to understand how we can make safe and open communities for both speakers and listeners to work together, trust each other, and care for everyone.

This leads us to a series of questions:

• Why is vulnerability in writing centers important—what benefits are there to being vulnerable and acknowledging others’ vulnerabilities?
• Where are these moments of vulnerability in writing center work?
• When do we share our vulnerabilities, and when do we hide our vulnerabilities?
• What is the difference between vulnerabilities that we feel as the result of life experiences and vulnerabilities that are part of our embodied identities?
• How do we navigate vulnerabilities with both empathy and action?
• What does it mean to be “vulnerable,” and does it look the same for everyone?

As part of responding to these questions, we take time to share our own vulnerabilities. While we reflect on these stories of vulnerability, we also relay ideas for how vulnerability can be integrated into writing center work, and how we can better respond to vulnerabilities as listeners, consultants, and co-workers. We hope to start a conversation on the vulnerabilities that we take into the writing center, as well as the vulnerability that the writing center as a space and practice puts on us. We conclude our chapter by providing activities for and examples of modeling vulnerability in your own writing center.

Lauren’s Story

Because it is mid-February in Michigan, I leave my apartment earlier than usual to make sure I have time to clear the snow off my car, navigate the half-cleared Michigan roads, and battle for a parking spot on campus before the lots are filled (a feat even more impossible in the cold, with more students driving rather than walking in the frigid temperatures and some spots taken up by the snow piles). Today, I am lucky and find a parking spot immediately, so I have time to grab coffee and arrive at my shift early. To pass the time before my appointments arrive, I log onto social media.

The first post I see notifies me that a friend of mine has died .

Immediately, I text a mutual friend to confirm the details. We quickly share stories and memories of our deceased friend and our frustration that we must mourn our friends before we are 30. Frustratingly, this is not the first time either of us has had to deal with death during the year—with the death of people our own age, other millennials who we probably just saw on Instagram or Snapchat the day before. Then, my appointment walks in, and I start a 4-hour writing center shift, where I have to shove aside my feelings and work with the writers who had scheduled appointments with me.

After my shift, I don’t get to fall apart—I’m on the job market, and I have an interview planned for the afternoon. So, I stay in the writing center, hoping the relatively public space will help me keep myself together until after I have to answer interview questions about my teaching and research and service—all of which, funnily enough, deal with issues of trauma and care and vulnerability. I’d love to be able to actually enact my research practices with the search committees, to be able to share the details of my life with them, to answer their call with “I just found out my friend died unexpectedly, and this is exactly why I do the work I do” instead of with a “hello,” but I know that doing so would probably mean that I don’t actually get that job . After my interview, I finally message some people in my program to say that my friend died and that I’ve been holding those emotions back all day.

Once I allow myself to feel these emotions, I think about the writing center as a space where I’d been forced to hide those feelings, to perform invincibility, to put on the mask and pretend nothing was going on for the writers who came in for help. Because I was trying to make sure I was caring for the writers I was working with, the mask of professionalism I wore meant that I was failing to care for myself and my emotions. In this way, the writing center felt like a space where I wasn’t allowed to be myself or to feel my own feelings.

But I then consider why I lingered in that space for an hour after my shift instead of going home, and I wonder if it is more complex than that. While I did not speak my vulnerabilities aloud, the writing center was still the space where I felt safe and comfortable in that moment, where I wanted to be in order to remain calm before an interview—it was a space of vulnerability, even if it was a silent vulnerability. The forced professionalism of the writing center, which felt stifling at first, ended up becoming a comfort to me as my shift ended. Because I knew I had to maintain my composure for the interview coming up, I found myself drawing on the writing center as a way to dwell in my emotions without being overwhelmed by them. I confessed what I was going through to a few other consultants who were there at the time, and who asked me how I was doing. They, in turn, offered their sympathies and support in ways that I needed. While I was silent about my feelings while working with writers, in the moment where I was no longer asked to act as a consultant (when my shift was over), I was able to start speaking my vulnerabilities.

Much of my work deals with silent vulnerabilities. Sometimes, this means considering how we can come to speak vulnerabilities and how we speak and story trauma, which carries many vulnerabilities. More recently, and for this project, I have become interested in how we as writing researchers, teachers, administrators, or consultants can support those who are vulnerable, whether we are aware of these vulnerabilities or not. In other words, the writing center may be a space for emotional vulnerability, a healing space as well as a consultation space. I’ve often found myself in the position of being a healer for writers who see themselves as “bad writers” or who don’t believe they can complete an assignment, but rarely have I felt that the center was a healing space for me. Indeed, the writing center seems set up to be a healing space for writers rather than tutors, as we often discuss how to navigate the feelings of those writers. What Elise, Rachel, and I consider here is how it can also be a potential healing space for those of us who work here.

To be clear, sometimes the writing center feels like another abuser , one that asks me to hang my vulnerabilities away at the door in order to work, invalidates my fears and worries, asks me to be professional and sees emotions as hindering that. In this way, writing centers mirror the institutions they are part of, the university settings wherein we are often asked to be students, faculty, and other professionals before we are asked to be people. But I believe that we do not need/have to feel this way in the center. This possibility can only be recognized as we open space for vulnerabilities, to not ask people to hang them at the door, to empathize with each other but also train our consultants to take action to help those who are vulnerable.

In my experience, writing center staff/administrators often pretend we’re not on fire. We put up images of “happy” writers and consultants on our webpages and tout our successes, but we ignore the failures that are all around us, including everyday feelings of depression, anxiety, and loss, or the general feeling of just being overwhelmed that many of us experience at some point (Figure 4).

But exposing vulnerabilities actually makes us a safer, and more honest, community. The writing center does not need to be a space that makes everyone “happy.” In trauma studies, we teach that rebuilding trust is often the exact opposite of making things “happy”: because trauma survivors know that happiness is often a façade, regaining trust is rooted in being open and honest about both personal vulnerabilities and institutional failings (Herman; Smith and Freyd ). I believe that the writing center (like many other institutional offices) has often failed survivors in its reticence to address trauma within its walls. Michigan State is in a particularly vulnerable moment in the wake of Larry Nassar , so the reluctance of any space to recognize sexual violence is an issue for all departments to consider. We cannot skip reflecting on our failures, to expose our own vulnerabilities instead of hiding or defending them. We don’t need to just put the “happy writer” stories on the writing center websites—we also need to put the things that show the bad, from the mundane struggles that writers may go through the recognition that writing centers exist within institutional settings that are often filled with harassment, discrimination, and violence.

Tell people how to address discrimination and make space for them to do so, because these stories emerge within the writing center spaces. Provide anti-harassment and intervention training to consultants as part of job training, because many of us who work here and the writers that we work with will experience these at some point. Acknowledge that a large amount of violence occurs within the universities most of us work for and work to address that problem within the writing center, providing university and community-focused resources for both ourselves and the writers who come to us with these stories to utilize.

Elise’s Story

Since 2007, I’ve worked in four different writing centers as a consultant, coordinator, and now interim assistant director. My experiences in each one have been different, but one constant has always remained: they have always been a place where messy things happen. Since writing centers often become a kind of hub for consultants to hang out, the writing center has served as a backdrop and setting for many everyday life moments for me. And I’m a grad student, which means I’ve seen some shit . Thus, writing centers have been a backdrop not just for my happy life moments, but also some of my darkest times. In undergrad, I used my job in the writing center as an excuse to avoid my abusive boyfriend. I’ve also been sexually harassed at two different writing centers, by both a man and a woman. I had a miscarriage in 2017, and the center was a setting for many conversations about my grief. I’ve had arguments. I’ve cried . I’ve hidden. I’ve experienced trauma in the writing center. It’s these everyday moments I want to discuss here.

Arguably, Geller et al.’s (2007) discussion of everyday moments hearkens to the positives of the center, to the way we all like to think of our centers: hubs of fun chit-chat, snack-eating, stimulating consultations, hilarious haikus composed in magnetic poetry, delicious treats left out for all. Of course, most, if not all, writing centers have these moments. But they also have other kinds of moments: moments where consultants and writers disagree or end sessions early; moments where a consultant quietly puts together an angsty poem on the magnet board (Figure 5); moments where no one remembers to water the plants (Figure 6), clean out the coffee pot, or throw away the dried-up markers; moments where our pain and vulnerability are only made visible through the traces we leave behind (Figure 7).

If the writing center is to be conceived of as a homey space, I think it’s only natural for us to think about the “dark” things that happen in home spaces: sexual harassment, death, abuse, tears.

When you have a miscarriage, you’re confronted with a lot of positive narratives about trying again, having a rainbow baby, or the notion that your baby is safe in heaven. None of these narratives brought me comfort or solace. Instead, I found the push for constant positivity to be hollow and stifling. In addition, after my miscarriage, I lived through the interminable wait for Michigan State’s Office of Institutional Equity to make a decision about a sexual harassment case (the setting of which was the writing center) that I filed. We often discuss the positivity to be found in an end result of a case like this, but what of all the negative feelings accompanying the weight (and wait) of it all? Where does that leave me or anyone else experiencing negative feelings in a writing center space often advertised as comforting and happy?

I find myself often seeking comfort under the blanket of bad feelings I have been so often encouraged to recover from or get over. Instead, I have found myself deep-diving into darkness as pure resistance against all the hope-filled narratives of rainbow babies, second chances, and babies in heaven. Last year, in solidarity with queer scholars like Lee Edelman ,  Ann Cvetkovich , Jack Halberstam , and Heather Love , I found myself holding on to my failure, my depression, my empty womb, my childless future, my traumatized body and spirit. Love argues that “‘feeling bad’ has been a crucial element of modern queer experience” (160) “given the scene of destruction at our backs” (162). Queerly reaching out into the writing center space, I looked (and continue to look) for evidence of some kind of solidarity in my own personal darkness. I have found that a reveling in the negative has often been my only queer comfort . Indeed, according to Cvetkovich, “it might. . . be important to let depression linger, to explore the feeling of remaining or resting sadness without insisting that it be transformed or reconceived” (14). Thus, if we are to consider the everyday moments of the writing center, it is important to think about the negative, sad, and dark everyday moments that occur in the center as well.

I found depressing poems constructed on the walls, neglected plants, broken chairs, leftover and ruined works of art, old abandoned toys, and more. If Geller et al. call for writing center scholars to “remain open to everyday moments” in the center (56), I argue we need to make sure we’re attending to the dark, heavy, sad, and angry moments as well. They have just as much a place in the center as happy ones. In examining the dark everyday moments of the center evidenced through our interaction with objects in the center, I believe we can develop a better understanding of our consultants’ and writers’ states of mind. In addition, examining the objects of our offices and other workspaces within the center can help us to name some of the vulnerabilities we have likely been trying to repress or ignore. For instance, as I walked around taking photos recently, our writing center director asked me to take a photo of the yet-to-be unpacked boxes in her office, evidence, she said, of a lack of time due to a difficult semester (Figure 10).

Taking time to attend to the hidden and invisible acts of vulnerability in the center can open up space for writing center staff to begin conversing about how and why we might be hiding our negative feelings in the center, or how our space might reveal what negative emotions or actions are present in our workspace. Such conversations allow us to begin cultivating an understanding of a center that is not always a positive space, but a much more complex community.

Rachel’s story

During a recent session with one of my regular writers, I noticed that she was paying particular attention to the tchotchkes on the table in front of us while getting ready for the session. This writer is a graduate student and former consultant herself, so this attention perplexed me, since these items seem very natural in this space. Suddenly, she turned to look at me and said with complete seriousness, “What’s with the tissues on all the tables? Is this for if we cry?” (Figure 11).

The tissues aren’t a new addition to our tables, so I was struck speechless for a moment.

“I mean, do they think we’re gonna start crying during sessions or something?” she said, and forced a laugh.

But then I noticed something. Instead of dismissing herself with the same nonchalant tone with which she brought up the conversation, she used the tissues on the tables as a way to segue into a disclosure of how she is handling the stress of the semester—one of her final ones for her doctorate—describing how she feels like she can’t display her emotions in academia as a Black woman, and mentioning some challenges in her personal life. I sat. I listened. Then, she turned to me, and she sincerely asked how I was.

What a can of worms , I thought before I contemplated whether I should be honest with her, or give her the routine “I’m okay” answer that I’d been giving everyone lately.

I paused while she stared at me, waiting, and I decided I was safe.

I decided to be vulnerable.

I started working in writing centers in 2002, and I’ve held the gamut of positions from peer tutor to administrator. Along with all the joys that writing centers have brought to my academic and personal lives, like meeting lifelong friends in nearly all of the four centers in which I’ve worked, what I think about more often is how my 17-year writing center tenure has been punctuated by moments of implosion and forced vulnerability. These moments occurred when the façade of my strictly-orchestrated life fell apart in ways that were publicly unavoidable, and in ways that forced me to embrace my vulnerability in the writing center despite my position—a somewhat unwelcome gesture in a fairly emotionally-charged space.

Two implosions have left the greatest marks on my writing center life. In 2013, I was serving as the assistant director of a writing center at a moderately-sized southeastern university. I started work there in 2010 after leaving a lateral position as a way to shake up my life and, I thought optimistically, provide the change needed to save my failing marriage. Little did I know then that simply moving states and jobs doesn’t change your life. Alas, in the summer of 2013, I got divorced, and as sometimes happens with divorce, I decided to return to my maiden name. I remember sitting in my office one day, tissues in hand and tears streaming down my face, as I talked to my program assistant and dear friend. I was trying to figure out how to tell my staff that I was no longer going by the name they all knew. I had a new/old name. For me, it felt like a welcome return, but the majority of my staff didn’t know what was going on in my personal life, and I worried about the best way of relaying such intimate information. Of course, throughout this process, I couldn’t hide my face; daily, I carried around on my body all I was going through with my puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks, and I’m sure my staff knew something was up.

After days of worry, I decided on an email simply and straightforwardly telling the staff what I was going through and what happened, to potentially head off any gossip that might occur. I chose to allow my colleagues into my life when I could have thrown up the walls around me even higher. Of course, my staff was empathetic, understanding, and welcoming of the new me; however, what I learned throughout this experience is that when we work in writing centers, we’re taught every aspect of how to care for our writers when they have meltdowns in our spaces, but we are rarely told how to care for ourselves when this happens . The needs of writing center tutors, administrators, and staff are made to feel secondary to the writers’ needs and desires, and I wonder if that’s how it should be.

Countless guidebooks and writing center training manuals show us what empathy toward a student looks like, but, perhaps ironically, they only relay one dimension of the friendly conversation that is encouraged in writing centers. Martini and Webster, in their introduction to The Peer Review special issue “ Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces ” make note of the absence of guidance, particularly in guidebooks and manuals, for actually moving through the writing center space when they say:

Although these guidebooks often recognize the power dynamics at play (i.e., between tutor, writer, and instructor) and may acknowledge that not all writers are the same (i.e., offering advice for working with multilingual writers, adult learners, writers with anxiety, basic skill levels, or disabilities), most of the advice is prescriptive. Little, if any, attention is paid to how practitioners might act in response to intersectional identities or to the complexity of power dynamics across difference.

What, then, do we do with our complex emotional needs and those of our staff in writing centers?

The second implosion happened in January of 2018, when my mother passed away. When it happened, thankfully, I was with her and my father. I’m close with our administrators in the current center where I work, and upon her passing, they sent out an email to our entire staff and departmental faculty telling them what happened. Similarly to when I needed to tell my staff about my name change in 2013, my personal life was again the subject of a staff email—this time, though, not of my own choosing, and not coming from me. While the email, and my own subsequent Facebook post of the obituary, meant that my close friends could reach out to me during this time, it also meant that I had to deal with the “sympathy stare” when I returned to school one week after her funeral: colleagues, classmates, and professors who had no idea what to say to me or what to do with my sadness, and just stared at me with unwanted sympathy in their eyes. I found myself meeting the stare dead-on in defiance or getting caught smiling and nodding to the sympathetic friend, a way to reassure them that I was, indeed, okay .

As prepared as I thought I was to handle what happened in a space where the source of my grief didn’t happen, I was not. Every time someone would lovingly ask me “How are you?” or do a double take at me in the center, or look away when I caught them staring at me, I fought back tears and the urge to run away. Sometimes I didn’t win the fight, and I just let the tears come. Many times I simply sat at a window-facing table in the main consulting area of the center and cried openly as I stared out the window. Most people were scared to talk to me and skittish around me; rarely did anyone know what to do with me in this public space; writers handled me with kid gloves when they saw my face. I didn’t know what to do with myself, either, but I figured if there was ever a time to cry in the center, this was it. Right on time, though, the deep, shaming voice inside me quietly said that I needed to get it together at work, that this wasn’t the place, that I should save my crying, emotions, and vulnerabilities for closed doors, that my emotions and my vulnerabilities were unwelcome in this space.

Particularly in unwelcome spaces—like academia, conferences, or anywhere public—vulnerability can be seen as a weakness rather than a kind of strength illustrated through an emotive action or experience (like tears, laughter, or anger). However, one can choose to see the act of vulnerability in unwelcome spaces as a diffraction of sorts: vulnerability breaks apart traditional (heteropatriarchal, academic, etc.) norms and expectations while stitching together the fragmented, emotional pieces of oneself that have been shattered by an event. The diffraction  provides us with a new way of seeing ourselves. It shows us that “there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind” because it requires us to be honest and in touch with ourselves in ways that encourage us to remember the ‘old’ of our desires while living in the new” ( Barad 168).

Most days, I don’t know if I’m ready to live with the new yet, but I am okay with sitting in the muck of my current state, even when it makes most people around me uncomfortable. This means that some days I need to cry in the center. I need to use the tissues at the table without shame or worry. I need to be visibly vulnerable with the people around me.

As I sat with my returning, graduate student writer that day and looked at the now-very-obvious tissues on the table, I made a decision. I leaned nearer to her and whispered, “Do you know what’s been going on with me this semester?” I never really know the best way to broach this topic now, so I tiptoed.

“No,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee, “What’s going on?”

“My mom passed away in January.”

“WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU EVEN DOING HERE?!” she exclaimed.

I gave her a weak smile and said, “I’m not really sure,” as I grabbed a tissue from the box (Figure 12).

In our own experiences, our vulnerabilities showed up in unexpected ways while we had to continue doing the everyday work of the writing center. Sharing these experiences in this chapter is a step toward what we would like to see writing center scholars continue to do: see and mark their centers as spaces where vulnerability is enacted on a daily basis. We conclude, then, with strategies for enacting and discussing vulnerability in  other writing centers, based on some of the care-based practices central to Lauren’s work.

At the beginning of this chapter, we asked:

• What benefits are there to being vulnerable, and to acknowledging others’ vulnerabilities?
• What do vulnerable moments mean, and how do we navigate them with both empathy and action?

Below, we share three ideas for how vulnerability can be integrated into writing center work, and how we can better respond to vulnerabilities as listeners, consultants, and co-workers:

Cathartic Worst-Case Scenario Dump

There are multiple ways to enact a cathartic worst-case scenario dump. The first is by teaching your consultants to approach their anxieties about the writing center head-on by naming them, walking through their worst-case scenarios and working backwards through them. During trainings, consultants could work through their worries about sessions by running through worst-case scenarios with each other and considering how they might respond if such events happen.

One worst-case scenario for a consultant might be working with a writer who brings in a paper that is offensive (e.g., one that makes discriminatory comments based on race, gender, sexuality, or ability). During a cathartic worst-case scenario dump, consultants could first name their fear for this session: that the writer brings in an offensive paper and they do not know how to address these offenses. Then, others would validate this worry while also discussing strategies and solutions. This allows the consultant to find a support system within the writing center for handling these kinds of moments—so that if a moment they fear were to arise, the consultant has both strategies and support around them.

Another way to perform the cathartic worst-case scenario dump is during actual writing center sessions. Specifically, consultants can be trained to handle writers’ anxieties by having mock sessions where the writer brings in a work with a major writing worry. Then, the consultant can ask the writer about their worst-case scenarios and help work through those with them.

For example, if a writer came in with clear anxieties, the consultant might pause a session to ask about their worst-case scenarios (e.g., “I won’t finish this paper in time and will fail the course”). Then, the consultant can help address the writer’s vulnerabilities directly by working through them: “Let’s help you brainstorm some ideas for this paper and create a timeline so that you can get something written and turn it in on time.” This allows the consultant to use the writer’s vulnerabilities to create a conversation, rather than stall it. By acknowledging their vulnerabilities, consultants show empathy but also make a plan of action that writers can put into place.

In both cases, the cathartic worst-case scenario dump is meant to allow consultants or writers to share their vulnerabilities and worries while also giving them support to work through these worries in community with others.

Crying as Praxis

Consultants are often taught how to handle writers’ emotions during sessions. Some writing center guidebooks teach us that one of the many hats we wear is that of counselor. We are told that during sessions where writers have extreme emotional reactions we should “offer support, sympathy, and suggestions” and make sure we’re offering students access to the appropriate campus resources ( Ryan and Zimmerelli 7-8). What is often left out of these scenarios is what happens when the consultant is the one having extreme emotional reactions. In these cases, we suggest that consultants be trained to handle themselves and their emotions with the same care and sympathy in which they would treat a writer, and to name those things when they happen during sessions or in the public spaces of the center. In other words, if a consultant feels like they might need to cry, don’t encourage them to rush out of the center to a private space; allow them to sit in the open and cry.

We understand that everyone handles their emotions differently. As writing center practitioners, we’re trained to understand this concept in sessions with writers (Ryan and Zimmerelli; Gillespie and Lerner ). What we’re suggesting here is that consultants could also be trained to feel comfortable enough to step out of sessions, ask for space or time off, or openly share their stories with people they feel safe with when they have emotional reactions in the writing center space.

Training consultants to be sympathetic and caring of themselves is not easy. There are no simple steps or heuristic, and for some, approaching sessions without the comfort of an invisible mask will feel impossible, or even unsafe. Training consultants to be sympathetic and caring of themselves is not easy. There are no simple steps or heuristic, and for some, approaching sessions without the comfort of an invisible mask will feel impossible, or even unsafe. However, when administrators and other senior writing center staff model emotional vulnerability during sessions and in their everyday work, the ethos of the center will shift to one where reciprocal emotional sympathy is accepted and the center will start to feel like a space that is safe enough for others to test the crying waters when they need to.

Let us offer a point of clarity here: modeling emotional vulnerability does not always have to mean crying in public. For some, this can be an unsafe public act. Instead, we’re advocating for consultants to feel comfortable expressing their emotions (in healthy ways) in the center. This could be through tears, but it could also be in heartfelt conversations, expressions of frustration, or giggle fits.

Capturing Evidence of Everyday Vulnerability

• In a writing center training class or during a writing center staff meeting, ask consultants to take a few minutes to walk around the space of the writing center, taking pictures of objects that leave evidence of consultant or writer vulnerability (perhaps using the photos in this chapter as an example).
• After writers have taken their photographic evidence, have them share their findings with each other in groups (Figure 13), making note of what they think the photographs say about the feelings of the people who made them, and why they might be feeling this way.

Key Takeaway

We can’t guarantee that your center will become more vulnerable if you enact the strategies we have shared, but we do hope that these practices might allow you the space to see where vulnerabilities can show up among consultants in your writing center. By creating deliberate opportunities for vulnerability in these ways, and in other ways, we believe that the writing center can become a more empathetic and responsive space. In addition, we believe that our deliberate act of sharing our own vulnerabilities as consultants and administrators can help start a conversation about the emotions of our consultants, instead of merely discussing the emotional needs of the writers who utilize our center. We—writing center administrators, consultants, and writers—come to the center with emotions and vulnerabilities; being invited to share these experiences can create more community.

Works Cited

Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart .” Parallax, vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pp. 168-87.

Caswell, Nicole I., Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors . Utah State UP, 2016.

Cedillo, Christina. “ What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy .” Composition Forum vol. 39, 2018. https://compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php

Craig, Collin Lamott, and Staci Maree Perryman-Clark. “Troubling the Boundaries: (De)Constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender .” WPA: Writing Program Administration , vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 37-58.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling . Duke UP, 2012.

Denny, Harry et al. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles . Utah State UP, 2019.

Dixon, Elise, and Rachel Robinson. “ Welcome for Whom: Introduction to the Special Issue .” The Peer Review , vol. 3, no. 1, 2019. http://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/welcome-for-whom-introduction-to-the-special-issue/

Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric . Syracuse UP, 2014.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive . Duke UP, 2004.

Geller, Anne Ellen, et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice . Utah State UP, 2007.

Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Learner. The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring . 2nd ed., Pearson, 2007.

Grimm, Nancy. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times . Heinemann, 1999.

Guarino, Kathleen, et al. Trauma-Informed Organizational Toolkit for Homeless Services . The National Center on Family Homelessness. 2009. https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Trauma-Informed_Organizational_Toolkit_0.pdf

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure . Duke UP, 2011.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror . Basic Books, 1997.

Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening .” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History , edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Routledge, 1991, pp. 57-74.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History . Harvard UP, 2009.

Marback, Richard. “A Meditation on Vulnerability in Rhetoric .” Rhetoric Review , vol. 29, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07350190903415149?journalCode=hrhr20

Martini, Rebecca Hallman, and Travis Webster. “ Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces: A Special Issue Introduction .” The Peer Review , vol. 1, no. 2, 2017. http://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/writing-centers-as-braver-spaces-a-special-issue-introduction/

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers . Utah State UP, 2012.

Morales, Aurora Levins. Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity . South End Press, 1999.

Powell, Malea, et al. “ Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics .” Enculturation , no. 18, 2014. http://enculturation.net/our-story-begins-here/

Rowan, Karen, and Laura Greenfield. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change . Utah State UP, 2011.

Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors . 6th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Smith, Carly, and Jennifer Freyd. “ Institutional Betrayal .” American Psychologist , vol. 69, no. 6, 2014, pp. 575-87. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-36500-001

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples , 2nd ed. Zed Books, 2012.

Yergeau, Melanie. “Saturday Plenary Address: Creating a Culture of Access in Writing Program Administration .” WPA: Writing Program Administration. vol. 40, no.1, 2016, pp. 155-65. http://associationdatabase.co/archives/40n1/40n1yergeau.pdf

In-Text Hyperlinked Notes

Vulnerability : We acknowledge here that public vulnerability comes more easily to us than to some of our colleagues and friends of color. There are many types of vulnerabilities; some vulnerabilities we all experience through individual life moments, but different embodied identities may also present vulnerabilities due to discrimination, harassment, prejudice, and other forms of violence. Two of us (Elise and Lauren) are members of the LGBTQ+ community, and Lauren is disabled; these identities do affect when, and if, we can be vulnerable in certain situations, just as our privileged identities that we have as white people make us less vulnerable.

Professionals : From Lauren: It’s also worth noting here that the standards of professionalism are rooted in sexist, racist, neurotypical, and ableist notions of emotional distance, and that instances where we show vulnerability (often coded as a feminine act) are seen as not fitting for the workplace.

Social Justice-oriented practices in a writing center : We draw from the work of writing center scholars like Harry Denny et al. and Karen Rowan and Laura Greenfield, who claim in their own ways that writing centers can be third spaces where issues of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and ability are meaningfully enmeshed in writing center conversations. We believe that writing centers, because of this liminal, third-space existence, are also spaces for those conversations to turn toward a social justice orientation.

We are not calling for everyone to always be vulnerable : It is the onus of the non-marginalized populations to create a safe enough space for these consultants to feel willing and able to discuss their vulnerabilities openly.

Care-based practices : For more discussion on care-based practices within university contexts, see the Two-Year College Association-Pacific Northwest’s 2019 newsletter, which outlines and discusses applications of trauma-informed values within institutional settings.

Died : From Rachel: Fortunately or not, for many of us, like Lauren and me, the writing center is often the space we’re in when alerted to bad or troubling news. The space then becomes filled with the (sometimes hidden) emotions of people experiencing this news.

I don’t actually get that job : From Elise: What I love about this is that you did get a job that values your vulnerability and trauma work. You get to be yourself there, be vulnerable in an academic space, and the students and faculty are better there for it.

Healing space : From Lauren: Here I use healing in a broad sense, recognizing the complexity and weight of the term. Many people prefer not to use “healing,” because it suggests that the vulnerability is a wound or a weakness to be covered up and disappeared, rather than something natural we use to learn and grow. I appreciate the idea of healing (-ing, not -ed) as a process rather than a state of being, however, and use the term to describe the interactions that we have with vulnerabilities and the process we go through to accept, work through, and live with these emotions.

Another abuser : From Elise: I certainly feel this, especially in this piece I wrote about sexual harassment and bisexuality a few years ago.

Larry Nassar : Larry Nassar is an American convicted serial rapist and sex offender, former USA Gymnastics national team doctor, former osteopathic physician, and former professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

For more information, visit https://www.michiganradio.org/post/timeline-long-history-abuse-dr-larry-nassar

I have seen some shit : From Rachel: Haven’t all of us graduate students seen some shit (some more than others, perhaps)?

Cried : From Lauren: The three of us also write about the specific act of crying in a forthcoming book chapter called “Crybabies in the Writing Center: Storying Affect and Emotion.” In it, we discuss crying as the same kind of vulnerable act we are calling for here, but also consider how crying comes with specific and complex power dynamics (who is crying and to whom?). But ultimately, crying, like many other forms of emotional vulnerability, presents opportunities to discuss social justice literacy, to form relationships and communities, and to reflect deeply on the emotions within our writing processes.

Michigan State’s Office of Institutional Equity : “MSU is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive community in which students, faculty, and staff can work together in an atmosphere free from all forms of discrimination and harassment. File a Report Now.”

For more information, visit this link: https://oie.msu.edu/

Queer Comfort : From Rachel: I think you’re right in that many times people disregard negative feelings in times of misery, grief, and discomfort to instead seek out “positive vibes” in an attempt to feel better, but I’m really glad you pushed against this and sat in your discomfort and sadness for a little while. I think it ultimately helped you deal with your trauma on a deep level.

Tchotchkes : Yiddish term for a small group of items that are decorative and/or otherwise disposable.

How to care for ourselves when this happens : From Lauren: This reminds me of the idea of vicarious traumatization, or the act of being traumatized by prolonged exposure to other people who are traumatized. This often occurs with therapists or emergency service workers, who are taught that their first priority is to the person they are responsible for rather than to themselves. Similarly, in our “professional” settings, we’re taught to think of ourselves as workers, consultants whose job it is to help the client, our writers. But what happens when we put ourselves aside in favor of caring for the other person?

Okay : From Elise: I remember this time very distinctly because I saw those smiles and stares as invitations to talk with you about your mom and your grief. While many people were avoiding you or giving you a “sympathy stare,” this is when our relationship began to evolve into a very close friendship.

Window-facing table : From Rachel: I now affectionately call this my “grief table” in the center.

We acknowledge here that public vulnerability comes more easily to us than to some of our colleagues and friends of color. There are many types of vulnerabilities; some vulnerabilities we all experience through individual life moments, but different embodied identities may also present vulnerabilities due to discrimination, harassment, prejudice, and other forms of violence. Two of us (Elise and Lauren) are members of the LGBTQ+ community, and Lauren is disabled; these identities do affect when, and if, we can be vulnerable in certain situations, just as our privileged identities that we have as white people make us less vulnerable.

From Lauren: It’s also worth noting here that the standards of professionalism are rooted in sexist, racist, neurotypical, and ableist notions of emotional distance, and that instances where we show vulnerability (often coded as a feminine act) are seen as not fitting for the workplace.

We draw from the work of writing center scholars like Harry Denny et al. and Karen Rowan and Laura Greenfield, who claim in their own ways that writing centers can be third spaces where issues of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and ability are meaningfully enmeshed in writing center conversations. We believe that writing centers, because of this liminal, third-space existence, are also spaces for those conversations to turn toward a social justice orientation.

It is the onus of the non-marginalized populations to create a safe enough space for these consultants to feel willing and able to discuss their vulnerabilities openly.

For more discussion on care-based practices within university contexts, see the Two-Year College Association-Pacific Northwest’s 2019 newsletter, which outlines and discusses applications of trauma-informed values within institutional settings.

From Rachel: Fortunately or not, for many of us, like Lauren and me, the writing center is often the space we’re in when alerted to bad or troubling news. The space then becomes filled with the (sometimes hidden) emotions of people experiencing this news.

From Elise: What I love about this is that you did get a job that values your vulnerability and trauma work. You get to be yourself there, be vulnerable in an academic space, and the students and faculty are better there for it.

From Lauren: Here I use healing in a broad sense, recognizing the complexity and weight of the term. Many people prefer not to use “healing,” because it suggests that the vulnerability is a wound or a weakness to be covered up and disappeared, rather than something natural we use to learn and grow. I appreciate the idea of healing (-ing, not -ed) as a process rather than a state of being, however, and use the term to describe the interactions that we have with vulnerabilities and the process we go through to accept, work through, and live with these emotions.

From Elise: I certainly feel this, especially in this piece I wrote about sexual harassment and bisexuality a few years ago.

Larry Nassar is an American convicted serial rapist and sex offender, former USA Gymnastics national team doctor, former osteopathic physician, and former professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

From Rachel: Haven’t all of us graduate students seen some shit (some more than others, perhaps)?

From Lauren: The three of us also write about the specific act of crying in a forthcoming book chapter called “Crybabies in the Writing Center: Storying Affect and Emotion.” In it, we discuss crying as the same kind of vulnerable act we are calling for here, but also consider how crying comes with specific and complex power dynamics (who is crying and to whom?). But ultimately, crying, like many other forms of emotional vulnerability, presents opportunities to discuss social justice literacy, to form relationships and communities, and to reflect deeply on the emotions within our writing processes.

"MSU is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive community in which students, faculty, and staff can work together in an atmosphere free from all forms of discrimination and harassment. File a Report Now."

From Rachel: I think you’re right in that many times people disregard negative feelings in times of misery, grief, and discomfort to instead seek out “positive vibes” in an attempt to feel better, but I’m really glad you pushed against this and sat in your discomfort and sadness for a little while. I think it ultimately helped you deal with your trauma on a deep level.

Yiddish term for a small group of items that are decorative and/or otherwise disposable.

From Lauren: This reminds me of the idea of vicarious traumatization, or the act of being traumatized by prolonged exposure to other people who are traumatized. This often occurs with therapists or emergency service workers, who are taught that their first priority is to the person they are responsible for rather than to themselves. Similarly, in our “professional” settings, we’re taught to think of ourselves as workers, consultants whose job it is to help the client, our writers. But what happens when we put ourselves aside in favor of caring for the other person?

From Elise: I remember this time very distinctly because I saw those smiles and stares as invitations to talk with you about your mom and your grief. While many people were avoiding you or giving you a “sympathy stare,” this is when our relationship began to evolve into a very close friendship.

From Rachel: I now affectionately call this my “grief table” in the center.

Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work Copyright © 2021 by Genie Nicole Giaimo; Kristi Murray Costello; Benjamin J. Villarreal; Lauren Brentnell; Elise Dixon; Rachel Robinson; Miranda Mattingly; Claire Helakoski; Christina Lundberg; Kacy Walz; Sarah Brown; and Yanar Hashlamon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Memoir coach and author Marion Roach

Welcome to The Memoir Project, the portal to your writing life.

The Role of Vulnerability in Writing

AS SOMEONE WHO TEACHES online memoir classes, I take a lot of questions on the fly. And, I admit, after all these years, I have many ready-made answers to those questions I’ve been asked repeatedly. Every once in a while, though, comes a question that penetrates to the heart of what every memoir writer must know, and stops me, causing me to acknowledge that not only have I never been asked this before, but that I will need to pull from some new place to provide an answer. This was the case recently, on a large, open online class, when someone asked, “how important is vulnerability in writing?”

I bowed my head and heard myself reply, “It’s everything.”

Because it is.

Why Do We Resist Vulnerability?

I am a huge believer in reporting on one’s life when writing memoir. I teach a webinar about it and talk about it all the time in The Master Class , and elsewhere, and practice it every day. The single greatest cure for any kind of writers’ block or stuck-ness is research, which is merely another name for reporting.

So, instead of just asking myself about the role of vulnerability in writing, I reached out to my friend Marsh Rose , an author and writer of considerable talent in her own right, and a licensed therapist, with whom I’ve sorted some of life’s deeper questions.

She reminded me that vulnerability “is one of the least appealing emotions we want to have,” which is why we avoid it when writing. She pointed out that when reading about vulnerability, “it taps into our own in a safe way,” but that when we write about it, it can feel “out of control.” As a result, we resist.

Makes sense, right?

What is Vulnerability?

All too often we associate vulnerability with weakness. Do you do this? You might. And if you so, it is hurting your memoir writing since it’s only when you go deep that you get the goods.

So, let’s attempt to Greenlight your vulnerability and use it to your best advantage, and let’s start by considering these words by poet David Whyte.

“Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding under-current of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature.”

He has more to say in this poem of his, which I strongly suggest you listen to and consider.

In it, he reminds us that to cut ourselves off from vulnerability is to “immobilize the essential.”

No artist wants to do that.

Does All Art Require Vulnerability?

Consider this quote from the great Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“ ‘My jump isn’t high enough, my spins aren’t perfect, I can’t put my leg behind my ear.’ Please don’t do that. Sometimes there is such an obsession with technique that it can kill your best impulse. Remember that communicating with an art form means being vulnerable, being imperfect. And most of the time it’s much more interesting. Believe me.”

How to Greenlight Your Vulnerability

With the help from the quotes above, I think we can agree that while we fear our vulnerability, we need to tap into it to create the art we were born to make. But how?

Let’s start with that idea of imperfection. Wrap your arms around it and consider it.

It’s possible that we learn the best stuff when examining our imperfection.

To do so, think in terms of what I call moving from “here to there.” This is something I talk about extensively in Memoirama, my intro online memoir class. To successfully write memoir, you must cover the territory only from here to there – from when you did not know something, to when you did; from when you could not do something, to when you could; from when you did not have something, until you did; or from when you had to shed something, and you did, and what life looks like now. Here to there. Remember: You are not writing autobiography when you write memoir. You are merely taking on one aspect of your life and showing us, in scenes, your transcendent change from here to there.

Consider a “here to there” of your own. What did you need to learn, not know, need to get or have to quit? When did you know you needed to change, how did you change and what are the results? And here’s a tip: Read those three questions again, answer them, and you have the three acts that portray every piece of memoir. 

Your vulnerability will be needed here to admit that you did not know something, could not do something you needed to do, that you lacked something or that you were perhaps addicted to something that you needed to quit. In fact, only vulnerability will reveal the big and small scenes that portray large and small life change. So tap into it.

How to Portray Vulnerability?

Consider any recent transaction you’ve had with someone or something. Specifically, sort for an experience during which you felt something shift inside you. Perhaps you had an encounter with your child, a stranger, your dog, a spouse, in the garden, listening to a song (yes, I co-wrote the lyrics for this one and yes, I sobbed while writing it, but more to the point, I changed outlooks during the work), or with someone at the post office.

What happened there? This is the essential question. Ask yourself, “What just happened?” In what ways do you feel different? Did something you once thought get edited, heightened, demolished or otherwise changed?

Now zero in on where you initially learned the idea, what about it was changed, just how that happened and where that new information might take you.

This is the territory of memoir, where we frequently shift from what we inherited from our family – their politics, religion, biases, culture or belief system – and take on something new, heighten and add to what we already know, or drop that inheritance in favor of something that better suits us.

I would argue that the very best memoir is written within the argument that you can say no to some inheritances. Don’t believe me? Have you ever tried to shed something you learned in your family of origin? It’s hard work – life work – and the very stuff of good memoir.

Simply put, if there is no change, there is no piece of memoir. Why not? Because merely recording what happened is autobiography, and knowing the difference between autobiography and memoir is essential to your success as a memoir writer.

Be Vulnerable When Writing

Go back and reconsider that experience where you felt that shift. Now dial back even further. What did you once think that got reconsidered or remade, and where did you get it?

For us to value that change, you must first show us what you once believed and where you got it, and while we do not need your entire childhood laid out for us, we need specific proof of that familial inheritance.

Maybe you remember being a child and going to vote with your mother, and maybe you remember your shared staunch devotion to some candidate from a party you can no longer support. Look at that arc. It takes us from here to there, and might make a lovely personal essay or scene in a book-length memoir about saying no to some inheritances.

What is the Greatest Obstacle to Vulnerability?

Perfectionism. Period. Trying to get it right with every sentence will curtail your honesty and demolish your curiosity, as well as your success. Here at The Memoir Project, we refer to a first draft as “the vomit draft.” Talk about being vulnerable, right? Few things bring us to our knees like a good vomit.

Simply put, perfectionism makes vulnerability impossible. When we set our sites on perfect, we are so busy trying to look great, sound great and be great that we miss the beauty in the mess.

You’ve got to walk into the mess, writers. Why? Because only then can you appreciate and chronicle how you walked out.

Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir classes Memoirama : Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know. Memoirama 2 . Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book. How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary : Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world. And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the  Master Class , the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.

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Related posts:

• Writing Lessons: The Role of Memory in Writing What You Know
• Ban All Writing Exercises and Prompts. Now.
• Ten Bad Writing Habits to Break Right Now

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Reader interactions.

Roja D. Sooben says

October 11, 2023 at 9:49 am

Dear Marion

Thank you so much for this timely wisdom.

Cheryl Lynn Achterberg says

October 11, 2023 at 12:11 pm

The advice “from here to there” was eye opening for me, the best explanation of memoir I have heard. From when I did not know something to when I did… Thank you for giving us your wisdom.

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Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy

Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (eds.),  Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy , Oxford University Press, 2014, 318pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199316656.

Reviewed by Joan C. Tronto, University of Minnesota

With Natalie Stoljar, Catriona Mackenzie edited one of the most influential collections of essays in feminist theory in the past two decades. In this collection, Mackenzie and her co-editors, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, have produced another volume that will be important for decades to come. It explores many dimensions of the concept of vulnerability and argues for its centrality as a concept in ethics. Within Anglo-American philosophy, given the centrality of such concepts as autonomy and agency, vulnerability has not been given much attention. Around 30 years ago, Robert Goodin wrote a justification for social welfare spending that extended to liberal political theory a consequentialist argument for "protecting the vulnerable." Goodin's idea proved widely influential, providing a basic justification whose title made it almost intuitively clear. Susan Okin, in Justice, Gender and the Family , was among the liberal theorists of justice who took the idea to be entirely persuasive. While many have since provided critiques of Goodin, the idea of "the vulnerable" went long unexplored in Anglo-American ethics.

The introductory essay makes many significant contributions. "What is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?" provides an account of why the co-editors are arguing for the centrality of this concept, but also why we now need a set of guideposts to help understand the concept. Vulnerability, they observe, has both universal and specific sets of meanings. "An important motivation of theorists who highlight the universality of inherent ontological vulnerability," they write, referring to such thinkers as Judith Butler, "is to focus attention on the need to reframe some of the founding assumptions of contemporary moral and political theory" (4). Yet another use of the term, such as Goodin's, "focuses on the contingent susceptibility of particular persons or groups to specific kinds of harm or threat by others" (6). How can one term do all of this work?

The editors propose that both of these ways of thinking about vulnerability are useful, and therefore we need a taxonomy to distinguish "distinct but overlapping kinds of vulnerability" (7). The taxonomy they offer is somewhat complex: it consists of three different sources of vulnerability and two states of vulnerability. The three sources include inherent vulnerability (those universal vulnerabilities intrinsic to the human condition), situational vulnerability (those that arise from context), and pathogenic vulnerability (situational vulnerabilities that arise from significant oppression or injustice, or "when a response intended to ameliorate vulnerability has the paradoxical effect of exacerbating existing vulnerabilities or generating new ones" (9)). Dispositional vulnerability represents a possible vulnerability (e.g., all women of child-bearing age might become pregnant) while occurrent vulnerability has actually happened (8-9).

From this complex taxonomy, the editors ask whether vulnerability by itself produces obligations, or whether vulnerability serves "as a signal that alerts us to obligations arising from other moral claims, such as those of harm or need" (10). They suggest that using vulnerability as a grounding for obligation allows us to critique contractarian notions of liberal theory, but is open to lines of criticism that are less severe when obligations are based, instead, on a notion such as need. They then observe that theories of justice need to answer such questions as who is responsible for dealing with vulnerability and how to address the problem that dealing with vulnerability often may produce further victimhood. Many of these questions have been addressed by theorists of care, but the advantage of starting from vulnerability is to place them into another and perhaps more familiar ethical framework.

In a second essay, Mackenzie addresses "The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability." This important essay offers a powerful critique of another protagonist of universal vulnerability, Martha Fineman. Fineman's work has emphasized vulnerability as an alternative to the overly self-reliant autonomous individual, for example, in The Autonomy Myth . Mackenzie suggests that with a more refined account of relational autonomy, vulnerability and autonomy are not opposites but mutually important elements of a fully human life. She 'distinguishes, though, between the libertarian accounts of autonomy that are Fineman's real target and a fuller account of autonomy "understood as both the capacity to lead a self-determining life and the status of being recognized as an autonomous agent by others" as "crucial for a flourishing life in contemporary liberal democratic societies" (41). Invoking the notion of capabilities also helps to fill in how the capabilities approach fits within this liberal democratic framework.

Not all people are autonomous throughout their lives, though; some people are dependent. Susan Dodds' excellent "Dependence, Care and Vulnerability" helps to address the question of who are dependent and how they fit into a framework of vulnerability and autonomy. Drawing on the work of Margaret Urban Walker and Eva Kittay, Dodds argues that dependency occurs when care is necessary to solve problems of vulnerability. She agrees with Walker that assigning responsibilities for such care is a complex process, but she disagrees with Kittay that caregivers are inevitably placed in a situation of dependency (though they are in other ways vulnerable). Dodds thus considers some clarifications about the nature of care and highlights the problem of pathogenic vulnerability if care workers abuse or do not respect their clients.

Another important essay that builds from the original tensions in the universal-particular taxonomy is Jackie Leach Scully's "Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power." Scully also highlights the differences between vulnerability understood as universal (or "global") and "contingent" vulnerabilities. She notes that for disabled people, accepting one or the other of these views creates a dilemma; they often find themselves in situations where they need to think about both kinds of vulnerability, not one or the other. One of the most interesting claims she makes, in the section that asks "Exactly What Are Disabled People Vulnerable To?", is what she calls Ascribed Global Vulnerabilities, i.e., "the tendency on the part of the nondisabled to extrapolate a genuine vulnerability in one area of a disabled person's life (e.g., physical weakness, economic precariousness) to a globally increased vulnerability stretching over the entirety of that person's life" (209). The concerns of disabled people present a concrete case about why these philosophical issues of defining vulnerability are so critical.

The rest of the essayists do not employ this taxonomy to address questions about vulnerability. Many of them deploy a conception of vulnerability to address other moral issues. For example, in "The Role of Vulnerability in Kantian Ethics," Paul Formosa shows that "there is no reason why vulnerability cannot play an important role in Kantian ethics" (95). Indeed, he goes further and notes that we are all susceptible in a broad sense of vulnerability "to being used as a mere means by others" (103). He also observes that Kantian ethics would ask us to be more attentive to those who are "narrowly" more vulnerable as well. Drawing on theories of recognition, Joel Anderson shows how exercising our autonomy requires recognition by others in order to make those exercises fully realized and that autonomy and vulnerability to others are "entwined." Wendy Rogers describes the place of the concept of vulnerability in contemporary bioethics. Margaret Urban Walker explains the difficulties of reparations as recreating a "moral vulnerability" among the victims. Marilyn Friedman uses the notion of vulnerability to make a case for the injustice of the ways in which women who are subject to domestic violence are often held responsible for failing to protect their children from their own abusers. Mianna Lotz notes the vulnerability of children to their parents' values. Amy Mullin considers the special needs of children for care, and the collection ends with an essay by Rosemarie Tong on the needs of aging people from the standpoint of vulnerability. Each of these essays does a fine job of illuminating the ways in which vulnerability helps us to understand morally difficult situations in a new light.

This collection illustrates the usefulness and diversity of the concept of vulnerability. The editors did not press upon the authors a single notion of vulnerability, and the volume is probably stronger for these divergent ways of thinking about vulnerability. Although the universal and particular forms of vulnerability play off against one another throughout the volume, there is no message, save the importance of this idea, that links the volume together.

In their introduction, Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds note that "A notable feature of the philosophical literature on vulnerability . . . is the diversity of background moral theories within which the concept has been analyzed" (17). While this is true, and while the essays represent various strands of feminist, Kantian, and relational moral theory, some elements of the diversity of these originary moral theories are not fully represented. Many continental writers on vulnerability emphasize other aspects of universal vulnerability, the fragility of life, for example, which lead them in different directions. The emphasis on liberal democratic moral and political theories may have flattened a question about whether vulnerability is best described as leading to obligations. Some feminist scholars who have emphasized human vulnerability, for example, might suggest that vulnerability leads directly to concerns about responsibility, rather than having to go through a two-step process in which obligations are acknowledged and then responsibility is assigned. The "protection" that vulnerability seems to call forth may require further analysis as well. As Sara Ruddick long ago noted, sometimes the response to vulnerability is care, sometimes the response to vulnerability is aggression. Thinking through issues of autonomy, vulnerability and violence remain part of the future agenda raised by this volume.

In all, though, this is a remarkably rich and important collection that will soon become essential reading in contemporary feminist and moral philosophy.

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We live in a world, that, to put it mildly, is less than kind at times. As the days go by, we may well feel poked, prodded, or just, simply, wronged. I’m sure we can all relate, I mean it’s hard to go through a year, let alone a day, without something being irksome. With all these pains, worries and injustices, who wants to open themselves to others, to be vulnerable; it may be the last thing on your list of things to do. Yet, we know great things can come from being vulnerable—think of the journeys we make to foreign places, the personal conversations we find ourselves in, or, simply, the unexpected events that life throws to us; it’s not all bad. In fact, how would we grow as people, as individuals, as a community, without being vulnerable to something, someone, or the world at large (or, without some other thing being vulnerable to us?).

Vulnerable Life

In our world, being vulnerable is not only part of daily life, but also part of the practice of being a writer. Being vulnerable in life is as vital as it is in being able to write well; why then do we worry about opening up, about sharing our deepest thoughts and feelings when we witness not only the pain such experiences bring, but also the positivity. You are vulnerable, I am vulnerable, together it is inescapable.

Ours, however, is a society where vulnerability is wedded to a certain weakness . Gender stereotypes and general prejudice abound when considering the baggage that comes with being vulnerable. We don’t know our teacher but we know that, if you want success, or to be a leader, you have to toughen up and close the world off: just be ‘you’, a promethean character, we are told. This “fear of vulnerability” is a pathology, not just for us as social beings, but as writers; seriously, who likes writing that is closed to the world? Who is moved by writing that is ironclad, fortress-like, cold and closed?

Being Vulnerable and Using vulnerability

To feel the connection between vulnerability and authenticity is not novel, nor is noticing the power vulnerability has to move people and change yourself. What makes for moving stories, for moving writing, is vulnerability to your audience. Turning towards the need to be vulnerable in writing isn’t simply about being personal; it is about being open to the world as a wider life practice. While, usually, being vulnerable means we have to be ‘deep ’, it doesn’t have to be; maybe being vulnerable happens in small ways, with small steps rather than deep plunges. It is time to embody the vulnerability that makes your writing alive to the world and all that happens in it. We must start by asking ourselves, which writing is not vulnerable to us, as readers?

Critically, vulnerability isn’t just a useful rhetoric practice, a deployment of pathos: it is but a part of living. Here, Brené Brown , distinguishes ‘using’ vulnerability and ‘being’ vulnerable; as Jane Harkness says “there is a stark difference” . The point for us, the laypeople, is that being vulnerable in and with our writing is about opening a space for dialogue, a space where we can write, think and be together, where we can grow, and, as Haraway says, “ stay with the trouble ”.

Being Vulnerable with Others

But how can we learn to be vulnerable in and with our writing? Here are some steps we can take:

• Be honest and trusting (we aren’t escaping being vulnerable to the world any time soon, trust that others are there for you)
• Do writing exercises (small essays, little scribbles, anything that isn’t too serious) – share it with others; de-escalate the fear you have of the experience
• Visit writing centres, us included (engaging with professionals may help depersonalise the whole experience)

We are not immune to being vulnerable, we need vulnerability for our writing to be itself, even if we are not of a literary mindset. We need vulnerability to be willing to change ourselves, and our writing; we need vulnerability to be willing to listen to the comments, thoughts, and criticisms others have of what we say. So, whoever you are, remember that good writing isn’t closed and invulnerable; it is there to be open, ready to reveal itself to world. I’m ready to be open to the world, are you?

About the Author:

Hey, I’m Luke, a masters student in Political Science with a Concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria; I am working to work out what I am actually working on. I completed my undergraduate in the UK with a year abroad of study in Munich, Germany. Now, I find myself acting as the Teaching Assistant Consultant for Political Science, an International Teaching Consultant, and as a Graduate Student Tutor at the Centre for Academic Communication.

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