Brene Brown once said, “We can measure how brave you are by how vulnerable you’re willing to be”. While I know she is right, I can’t help being afraid of the word ‘vulnerable’. In my head, I ask myself what I am willing to be vulnerable to? What could I do to be more vulnerable? After much thought and a lot of fear, I realized what I am afraid of. I am afraid of working hard and failing.
The fear of failure is very common in our world. Thirty-one percent of people have this fear, which puts it above the fear of spiders. The reason why I have this fear is that I tend to be very unmotivated when I want to try something.
For example, I have been wanted to write a book and publish it since I was in eighth grade. Considering the fact that I am now graduating from college shows that I have been putting this off for a while. When I first wanted to publish a book, I wrote a short story for one of my classes. It was a historical fiction that took place in Pompeii right before it exploded. I showed it to many of my classmates who took interest in the story and demanded that I make a sequel. They wanted to know if one of my characters survived. I started on a second draft and after some setbacks, I put it aside and haven’t worked on it since. That same process has been repeated about ten times since then, where I wanted to publish a book and then I don’t.
Part of me realizes that I don’t want to publish a book with high expectations that it’s going to do well only to find that no one wants to read it. That I was vulnerable enough to take part of my soul and place it in a book that no one wants. So what do we do when we are scared of being vulnerable?
I remember a movie that came out around 2013, We Bought a Zoo. I remember when I watch the scene when the dad tells his son about his twenty seconds of insane courage. That all you need is just twenty seconds of insane courage and your whole life will change forever. Comparing it to the insane deed of writing a book and realize that that quote is crap. You don’t need twenty seconds of insane courage, you need twenty seconds of insane courage to start. To finish, you need to push yourself to insane heights and push through until you are finished. It is in the act of finishing that you truly understand the courage it takes to be great.
I think that is what I should remember before being vulnerable. That it will take time and it will be hard but to say that I did something great make the hard moments enjoyable. Remember, “success is not a destination, but a journey (anonymous).”
