Quotes About Vulnerability

Be brave. Write what's true for you. Write what you think. What about what confuses you and compels you. Write about the crazy, hard, and beautiful. Write what scares you. Write what makes you laugh and write what makes you weep. What what makes you feel ashamed or proud. Writing is risk and revelation. There's no need to show up at the party if you're only going to stand around with your hands in your pockets and stare at the drapes.

I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I'd told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world.

Every now and then I could see myself--truly see myself--and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was "the woman with the hole in her heart." That was me. That was why I'd longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT.

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.

Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

You don't have to be broken for me. I didn't have to be broken for him, even though parts of me were. I could be every piece of myself and he'd love me still. My appeal did not rely on my weakness or my need. It relied on everything I was and wanted to be.

When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants.

As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn't put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.

Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you'll crucify me for it.

She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

I hope you can do that someday with someone else," I said when he didn't reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart. "I hope you can too," he said. I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the next time around. It felt impossible to me.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid. When

This isn't about strength," said Pat. "And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

I'm not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn't feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn't entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.

Heridas?" -fue lo único que conseguí decir. "Sí" -afirmó Pat- "Y tú tienes esas heridas en el mismo sitio. Eso es lo que hacen los padres si no curan sus propias heridas. Hieren a sus hijos en el mismo sitio.

I was intrigued. I was unattached. In my youth and sorrow, I was ready to self-destruct. So

There's nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn't strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can't share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

Every evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from the vastness itself.

I want someone special. I want to be loved and to receive love; to have someone there for me. My hunger for this is so great that I fear it's too much to ask anyone for. I'm afraid that if the volunteer coordinator did go out with me, I'd share all this with her at once, and though she'd be compassionate, she'd be scared off because she'd perceive me as needy.

I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.O

Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.