Humans are perhaps instinctively inclined to adopt principles of reasoning — everything has a cause and an explanation. I was so in love with the sincerity of objectivity that I began my Boston University career as a neuroscience major.
Science is defined as a body of knowledge based on fact and observation. It is cyclical and thus self-correcting through peer-reviewed journals and testable hypothesizes. Life is messy, and though I’ve always been interested in a lot of messy topics, I aspired to clean them up, organize them and then pack them up into color-coordinated and labeled boxes for future reference.
Unfortunately, this attempt came with some realizations. All of those most memorable, box-able moments are about connection. For our generation, nearly all our life is about connection. We are always connected in some way, through Facebook or email or text. We need only look at how much time we invest in connection to come to the conclusion that it’s important — neurologically, it’s even how we’re wired.
Connection gives us purpose and meaning, but when you ask your friends about love, they often tell you about heartbreak. When you ask them about belonging, they speak of being alone, of not being enough. We, as college students, are familiar with the sensation that we are not enough — not smart enough, thin enough, beautiful enough, rich enough, athletic enough.
With this sensation of not enough, comes an underpinning of vulnerability. Vulnerability being the fear that someone else will see that we are not enough.
When we look at people who are successful in life and in love, there appears a general pattern of connection without fear, of living with a deep sense of worthiness and courage.
These people like Lauryn Gilroy or David Fontana have, with almost laughable simplicity, the courage to be imperfect. They have the compassion to be kind to themselves and consequently, kind to others. They have connection as a result of being genuine to themselves. They embrace vulnerability. They believe that what makes them vulnerable makes them beautiful.
These people are willing to do things with no guarantees, willing to invest in relationships that may or may not work out. Worse than this, they believe these things are essential, that vulnerability is essential.
I, the girl who curls scientific thought around her like a shield, at first thought this was betrayal. Research is about the ability to control and predict, and now here are these people telling me that the way to live is with vulnerability, to stop controlling and predicting.
There are people out there who would come to this realization, embrace it and release themselves into the light. I am not that person. I’m not even friends with that person. I wanted to take vulnerability, box it up nicely, tie it with a ribbon, be done with it and then have a beer and watch an episode of “Sex and the City.”
So how is it that these people deal with vulnerability? What choices do they make that differentiates them from me? What makes us feel vulnerable? I have a few answers, at least for myself — asking someone out, applying for a job or thinking about what I’ll do post-grad.
As it turns out we live in a vulnerable world, and one of the ways we deal is through numbing vulnerability. The issue here is that emotion cannot be numbed selectively. You can’t say, here is the bad stuff: loss, disappointment, fear — I don’t want to feel these. You can’t numb hard feelings without numbing the other affects.
When we numb, we numb happiness, and then we feel vulnerable, so we have a few beers and a spoonful of Nutella. It then becomes this dangerous cycle. The more fearful we are, the more vulnerable we are and in turn, the more fearful we are.
One of the things we need to think about is how and why we numb. I think one way we numb is by making the uncertain, certain. Religion isn’t about faith and mystery. It’s about certainty. I’m right, you’re wrong, shut up. This is politics. There isn’t any discourse or debate, just blame.
We start to perfect, with SAT scores, college essays, the D1 team with a 4.0 GPA. We pretend that what we do doesn’t affect other people. From insurance companies and oil spills, to playground bullies and our personal lives, we act like what we are doing doesn’t have an impact on others.
We need to put fear aside and let ourselves be seen, vulnerably seen. We need to love with our whole hearts, even when there is no guarantee — and that’s hard, but in those moments of heartbreak, we need to look at ourselves and say, to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive. We need to start working from a place that says, I’m enough, and maybe then we will stop reasoning and start living.
Arielle Egan is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Fall 2012 columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at aegan@bu.edu.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
