On Vulnerability, Part II (John Inazu)

Photo courtesy of Anna Bye for Urbana

Photo courtesy of Anna Bye for Urbana

A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Heidi Kolk contributed to this series a beautiful reflection on vulnerability.  Heidi’s essay explained and modeled the challenge of showing vulnerability from a position of authority.  This challenge exists in many imbalanced relationships: parent-child, employer-employee, and teacher-student, to name just a few. 

I’ve come to realize that another such relationship is speaker-audience. Before the pandemic, I used to spend a fair amount of my time speaking to public audiences.  I enjoyed those engagements, but I seldom knew the people to whom I was speaking.  And this unfamiliarity complicated my ability to connect with them on a human level. 

As many public speakers and public writers recognize, one way to bridge relational distance with an audience is through emotional transparency. This kind of transparency must avoid both manipulation and oversharing: we’ve all squirmed uncomfortably watching a speaker embellish or share too much. 

In many cases, emotional transparency also means limiting vulnerability, leaving parts of yourself deliberately unexposed.  My friend Tish Harrison Warren has reflected on this challenge:

As a writer — and simply as someone on social media — I have a bit of a mysterious (to me at least) and, at times, perplexing relationship with the amorphous “public.” If you have read my book, you know my favorite foods and the names of my close friends, you know about a particular fight I had with my husband one morning (that framed chapter six), and that I like NPR, Parks & Rec, and iced coffee (lately by the gallon). If you follow me on Twitter, you may know my political or theological convictions; we may have even argued or joked with each other. You know me and yet you don’t know me — or, at least, you don’t know what I don’t share. You don’t know my children or what I’m like when I’m very sad or the moments I am most uncool.

In her essay on public lament from which the quote above is taken, Tish wrestles with how much to share, how much to make known and leave unknown.

I have tried to find a similar balance in my own speaking and writing, and along the way I am learning more about the difference between emotional transparency and vulnerability.  My first Carver Connection recounted a story of personal loss—my dad’s death last year—that is still very real and painful to me. But as Andy Crouch notes in his wonderful book, Strong and Weak, the kind of emotional transparency I offered is not necessarily the same as genuine vulnerability: “the vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value.”  

Telling the story of my dad’s death is this series was emotionally transparent in what I hope was an appropriate and helpful way.  Sharing the same news with a large class of first-year law students the day after he died was an entirely different experience, much closer to the kind of vulnerability that Andy names.  And I think part of the difference has to do with Andy’s observation of the risk involved: in my case, the possibility of losing my composure—and with it my stature—in front of my class.  When I read Heidi’s reflection a few weeks ago, I read and experienced something closer to this deeper vulnerability. 

My hunch is that there is also a connection between vulnerability, risk, and immediacy.  It is easier to reflect on past failures and losses than present ones. This immediacy constitutes one of the major challenges of writing for this series: because so much of life is now situated by the pandemic and related economic challenges, many of us are reflecting in real-time about painful moments.

How do we write, describe, and reflect on our own experiences in helpful ways when those experiences are so vast, varied, and changeable from day to day? My own life these days feels like a constant mixture of gratitude and lament.  I am grateful for extra time with family due to canceled trips, and I am anxious about lost income from those trips on top of a steep cut to my faculty salary.  I am thankful to have published a new book, and disappointed that the current crisis understandably diverts attention away from that book.  I am grateful for the work of The Carver Project but exhausted from the additional workload that it brings.  I am thankful for Zoom, and I hate Zoom.   

I find all of this much harder to process knowing that many in this country and around the world are confronting far greater challenges than mine.  And when I pause to think about it, I realize that my relative privilege means that others around me are always experiencing greater challenges and obstacles, perhaps filled with greater gratitude and deeper lament.  How should I think about a pay cut when millions have lost their jobs?  What does it mean to feel disappointment over lost opportunities when many around me are grieving lost lives?  And how do I begin to think about conveying those reflections to a public audience that I don’t know and that doesn’t know me? 

In this series, we are writing to make sense of our changed lives in a way that points to hope and flourishing and not despair or self-absorption. For me, in this new season, I think the most emotionally transparent and honest thing I can write is that I’m not yet sure how best to model that kind of vulnerability.  But I am grateful for the ways that the contributors in this series have modeled it for me.  And I am grateful that all of us at The Carver Project follow a savior who, “being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing” (Philippians 2:6-7): embodying ultimate vulnerability in order to usher in ultimate flourishing.

John Inazu is The Carver Project’s executive director and the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

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