One of the hardest things to do as a person, as a human being, never mind as an artist, is not only accepting that you must be vulnerable at times, but intentionally putting yourself in vulnerable situations.
Keep in mind, as I move forward with this discussion, that vulnerable does not mean making yourself weaker. It does not mean putting yourself in a position to be hurt or exploited because of ignorance. It means taking what amounts to a calculated emotional risk.
As an artist, you create something, often from nothing, and then you put it out into the world for people to see. Sure, these days we usually mean social media, but artists have been doing this forever. There is an inherent vulnerability in creating something personal and then allowing other people to see, to judge it. I don't think most people stop to consider how exposed that can feel. They know it doesn't feel good when someone insults their work. They know it doesn't feel good when someone says, "This isn't very good." And they also know it doesn't feel good when nobody says anything at all, when the work simply seems to disappear unnoticed.
What's interesting is that this applies to everyday life just as much as it applies to art.
We stay guarded. We lock things down emotionally and sometimes practically. We build a little bubble around ourselves. The armor goes up. We stop doing anything that feels vulnerable. We stop putting things out there that can be criticized. We stop showing the softer parts of ourselves because we're afraid they'll be mistaken for weakness.
On the surface, it feels like protection. It feels like we're keeping potential pain at a distance.
But what are we really doing?
We're forgetting to live.
Life is an absurd experience. It isn't supposed to make perfect logical, rational sense all the time. Strip almost anything down to its bare essentials and it becomes surprisingly revealing. Sometimes people make the joke that if you really admire someone, especially some Hollywood celebrity or larger than life figure, imagine them sitting on the toilet taking a shit. You don't have to graphically picture it. The point is that it instantly humanizes them. It reminds you that no matter how famous, wealthy, talented, or admired someone is, they're still just another human being. Corporate billionaires, Hollywood heartthrobs, photographic artists living in South Texas, none of us escape the realities of being human.
And, more dramatically, none of us escape death.
So vulnerability isn't some unfortunate side effect of being human. It is one of the defining characteristics of being human.
We can spend our lives protecting ourselves. We can hide our hearts, hide our thoughts, hide our work, convincing ourselves that we're staying safe. But that's not really living.
Vulnerability is going to happen whether you like it or not. You're going to feel exposed sometimes. You're going to feel uncertain. You're going to feel afraid.
If you can learn not only to tolerate those moments but to embrace them, even celebrate them, your life changes. I genuinely believe that. It isn't an easy path, but the energy you spend hiding, locking yourself down, protecting your work, protecting your heart, protecting your soul, isn't all that different from the energy required to learn how to live openly despite the risk.
The difference is in what you get back.
When you embrace vulnerability, the payoff is enormous. Not just internally, but externally as well. People recognize it. They respect it, because what they're actually witnessing isn't weakness: They're witnessing courage.
We tend to think of courage as something dramatic. War. Self defense. Maybe shit you see in action movies. Those things certainly require courage, of a sort.
But sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is allow ourselves to be vulnerable after spending years teaching ourselves to stay emotionally locked down because we never wanted to feel pain.