How To Be Vulnerable (in love & in poetry)

“If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known”

I saw this quote from Tim Kreider last week in the medium of a meme (photo of embroidered text, 2023), and I audibly gasped. Do you feel it too—your body saying no on a cellular level to the mortifying ideal of being known?

I am in love (hold your applause), and I am trying every day to submit, reveal, rinse, repeat. And in my writing, I have been trying for over a decade. Both poetry and love in all their forms ask us to lift the veil uncover the wound.

But how can we do this uncovering when our bodies, so wired for survival, are begging us not to?

Have a conversation with yourself, a circular, never-ending progression of question and answer. 

Ask yourself where it hurts. Answer. You can point. You can say here. 

Ask yourself when was the last time it didn’t hurt there, and what did that not-hurting feel like. You might answer when I was small at the top of a willow tree and the horizon was the earth blushing over the flattery of the sky/when life seemed kinder/ it felt like a drop of honey/ like a butterfly in a drop of honey /honey like amber/ amber like preservation/butterfly like free thing

Ask yourself what it would be like if you could snap your fingers and stop hurting. You might answer what if I am nothing but wounds? What if they heal and I disappear entirely? What if I forget the bad that happened and that makes the bad happen again?

If you’re very brave, you can ask yourself what was the bad that happened, and then you can excavate the answer. 

Then let that conversation go on forever.