lee is writing an essay on vulnerabilities

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Why Vulnerability is Key in Your Personal Statement

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Kaila Barber in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

The Goal of the Personal Statement

Why is Showing Vulnerability Important?

How to tell if you’ve been vulnerable in your essay.

The Goal of the Personal Statement

The main goal of your personal statement essay is to show the reader how unique and interesting you are. Your essays are how the admissions officers find out the kind of student you would be on their campus and how you’re going to fit in with their community. This is your chance to show the admission office who you are, especially the things that don’t show up on paper. If you have an interesting hobby, or there’s something about you that really stands out, this is the place you want to try and include that in your college application.

Outstanding personal statements that really wow colleges usually are about, or include aspects of, one of four common topics. These are vulnerability, values, insight, and craft.

Vulnerability is useful to show in your essay because it makes your writing feel personal and genuine. Your personal statement is called your personal statement for a reason, so you should make it personal.

If you had to write right now and say what vulnerability, or being vulnerable, means to you, what would you say? What have you noticed about those around you when they’re being vulnerable? Ask yourself about what you feel when you’re vulnerable. These are great questions to think about before you begin writing. This kind of self-reflection is especially important for writing personal statements.

Showing vulnerability in your essay demonstrates your ability to connect to another person on an emotional level, sharing feelings and morals. That is a trait that you can use to make the reader feel more connected to you and invested in being part of your success. This doesn’t mean that you have to write about your deepest and darkest secrets inside your essay, but your essay should be a little bit personal. This means being open and expressing your true emotions and thoughts.

You might be asking yourself, how do I know if I’m displaying vulnerability? A great way to test this is if your essay is personal and unique enough then if you put this essay on someone else’s application it won’t work for them. There are a lot of students who are in similar extracurriculars, so you have to make sure your essay is unique enough to not fit a student who does similar activities to you. If your essay would fit for other students, then you’re not being specific enough.

When you’re vulnerable enough and include enough detail about yourself, your reader is going to read your essay and feel more of a connection with you because they are getting a better understanding of who you are. This understanding will go beyond your AP or test scores, or any other number on your application. You want your readers to see you as a person to whom they feel connected. Always keep this in mind when you’re brainstorming your personal essay and how best you can display vulnerability.

Graduate Writers Community

Writing your thesis or dissertation is hard work. join the community and make writing social., being vulnerable in writing.

We live in a world, that, to put it mildly, is less than kind at times. As the days go by, we may well feel poked, prodded, or just, simply, wronged. I’m sure we can all relate, I mean it’s hard to go through a year, let alone a day, without something being irksome. With all these pains, worries and injustices, who wants to open themselves to others, to be vulnerable; it may be the last thing on your list of things to do. Yet, we know great things can come from being vulnerable—think of the journeys we make to foreign places, the personal conversations we find ourselves in, or, simply, the unexpected events that life throws to us; it’s not all bad. In fact, how would we grow as people, as individuals, as a community, without being vulnerable to something, someone, or the world at large (or, without some other thing being vulnerable to us?).

Vulnerable Life

In our world, being vulnerable is not only part of daily life, but also part of the practice of being a writer. Being vulnerable in life is as vital as it is in being able to write well; why then do we worry about opening up, about sharing our deepest thoughts and feelings when we witness not only the pain such experiences bring, but also the positivity. You are vulnerable, I am vulnerable, together it is inescapable.

Ours, however, is a society where vulnerability is wedded to a certain weakness . Gender stereotypes and general prejudice abound when considering the baggage that comes with being vulnerable. We don’t know our teacher but we know that, if you want success, or to be a leader, you have to toughen up and close the world off: just be ‘you’, a promethean character, we are told. This “fear of vulnerability” is a pathology, not just for us as social beings, but as writers; seriously, who likes writing that is closed to the world? Who is moved by writing that is ironclad, fortress-like, cold and closed?

Being Vulnerable and Using vulnerability

To feel the connection between vulnerability and authenticity is not novel, nor is noticing the power vulnerability has to move people and change yourself. What makes for moving stories, for moving writing, is vulnerability to your audience. Turning towards the need to be vulnerable in writing isn’t simply about being personal; it is about being open to the world as a wider life practice. While, usually, being vulnerable means we have to be ‘deep ’, it doesn’t have to be; maybe being vulnerable happens in small ways, with small steps rather than deep plunges. It is time to embody the vulnerability that makes your writing alive to the world and all that happens in it. We must start by asking ourselves, which writing is not vulnerable to us, as readers?

Critically, vulnerability isn’t just a useful rhetoric practice, a deployment of pathos: it is but a part of living. Here, Brené Brown , distinguishes ‘using’ vulnerability and ‘being’ vulnerable; as Jane Harkness says “there is a stark difference” . The point for us, the laypeople, is that being vulnerable in and with our writing is about opening a space for dialogue, a space where we can write, think and be together, where we can grow, and, as Haraway says, “ stay with the trouble ”.

Being Vulnerable with Others

But how can we learn to be vulnerable in and with our writing? Here are some steps we can take:

Be honest and trusting (we aren’t escaping being vulnerable to the world any time soon, trust that others are there for you)
Do writing exercises (small essays, little scribbles, anything that isn’t too serious) – share it with others; de-escalate the fear you have of the experience
Visit writing centres, us included (engaging with professionals may help depersonalise the whole experience)

We are not immune to being vulnerable, we need vulnerability for our writing to be itself, even if we are not of a literary mindset. We need vulnerability to be willing to change ourselves, and our writing; we need vulnerability to be willing to listen to the comments, thoughts, and criticisms others have of what we say. So, whoever you are, remember that good writing isn’t closed and invulnerable; it is there to be open, ready to reveal itself to world. I’m ready to be open to the world, are you?

About the Author:

Hey, I’m Luke, a masters student in Political Science with a Concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria; I am working to work out what I am actually working on. I completed my undergraduate in the UK with a year abroad of study in Munich, Germany. Now, I find myself acting as the Teaching Assistant Consultant for Political Science, an International Teaching Consultant, and as a Graduate Student Tutor at the Centre for Academic Communication.

Vulnerability: Positive and Negative Sides Essay

Introduction, vulnerability.

Vulnerability is quite an ambiguous matter since its influence might be positive or negative, depending on an individual’s attitude. For example, in a video provided by TedTalks, Brené Brown talks about vulnerability as “the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love” (Brown, 2010, 12:18). While some people might find vulerability a shortcoming when it comes to decision-making, others will use it to explore new things and show courage to learn something new.

Additionally, Brown illuminates another point of vulnerability when people make everything that is uncertain certain. For example, once religion was simply a mystery, but now there are certainties that help people divide right from wrong (Brown, 2010). Moreover, when it comes to decision-making, people pretend that their actions will not have an impact on others (Brown, 2010). Whether it is a bailout or an oil spill, many do not think of the different perspectives and effects of their actions.

When it comes to the organization, American Public University, and its imperfect decision-making factors, it is necessary to keep in mind that all decisions are impacted by people’s behaviors. In this respect, individuals primarily act according to their values and personalities, which does not always result in perfect decisions. Among the examples that can be choosing candidates for financial aid, which can result in wrong decisions. Moreover, abolishing the SAT and ACT in the admissions process can also be an example of imperfect decision-making, the results of which can be completely unpredictable.

Hence, vulnerability plays a big role in people’s lives, either becoming a shortcoming or an advantage. However, when it comes to decision-making, vulnerability plays a big role in such a process. People, by nature, try to make everything uncertain certain and often disregard the consequences of their actions. As a result, not only people but institutions might be susceptible to imperfect decision-making, which can later be amended with experience.

Brown, B. (2010). The power of vulnerability . TED Talks. Web.

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Bibliography

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4 The Hidden and Invisible: Vulnerability in Writing Center Work by Lauren Brentnell, Elise Dixon, & Rachel Robinson

Keywords : Vulnerability, emotion, social justice, trauma, identity, embodiment

It’s often uncomfortable to be vulnerable with others, especially within public spaces.

Introduction.

It’s often uncomfortable to be vulnerable with others, especially within public spaces. Witnessing others’ vulnerabilities and being vulnerable ourselves asks us to extend empathy that might make us feel uncomfortable. Further, vulnerability is a privilege not always extended to everyone. As white people, we acknowledge that vulnerability doesn’t look the same for everyone and may even be dangerous for certain populations, such as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Throughout this piece, we consider what Richard Marback means when he says, “vulnerability requires more of us than empathy” (7), and what working with empathetic vulnerability might require of us in the writing center. What does it mean for us, and for more inherently vulnerable populations, to push past empathy into a space of authentic vulnerability? Does this look different in writing centers? As white people, we acknowledge that vulnerability doesn’t look the same for everyone and may even be dangerous for certain populations, such as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Writing centers are often idealized as successful and happy academic spaces ( Grimm ; McKinney ), which contributes to the promulgation of a welcoming facade. However, writing center scholars often know that the concept of welcome is much more complicated and freighted with the emotional labor of consultants and directors ( Caswell et al. ; Dixon & Robinson ).

When the three of us came together to write about being vulnerable in writing center work, we didn’t realize how we each independently approached the writing center space as one that simultaneously welcomes and rejects visible acts of vulnerability, particularly when enacted by tutors, administrators, and staff members. To be clear, writing centers are often described as “caring” spaces that resist traditional impersonal hierarchical structures and welcome vulnerability, but they also tend to be described as academic spaces that prioritize professionalism. Thus, vulnerability should be present in our interactions with clients but also shouldn’t , because we’re professionals . However, painful moments that require—or demand—visible vulnerability are often unpredictable; people do not schedule writing center appointments around these moments. Instead, moments of vulnerability present themselves in the “everyday” of the center: in our conversations, in our sessions, and in the ways we interact with the writing center space itself, and they are, sometimes, not pleasant or “welcome.”

Traditionally, writing centers are marked as comforting spaces, often with touches of “home” like plants, coffee makers, and couches (McKinney). These comforting touches of home (hopefully) help to make the writing center an open, welcoming hangout space for consultants and writers alike. In this space, ordinary moments take place through social interactions but also in the mundane interactions with objects in the center. Gellar et al . call for writing center directors and scholars to “remain open to everyday moments” in the center (56), suggesting readers consider the everyday chats between consultants during their breaks and the meaning made in created and found objects such as magnetic poetry (Figure 1), internet bookmarks, and unshelved books (56). Indeed, they argue that seeing the everyday in these artifacts is one way to uncover what means and what matters in our writing centers” (58).

Magnetic poetry on a blue background that says: “Roses are repulsive / Death at once.”

For us, evidence of vulnerability is present in the objects left behind in the center: in neglected plants left to die on the tables (Figure 2), in the magnetic poetry constructed to describe a client or consultant’s grief or apathy, in the toys and crayons broken and pulled apart after an anxiety-riddled session. Photographs of such evidence of everyday vulnerability are scattered throughout this article and are intended to illuminate how inanimate objects can reveal deep—and sometimes negative—feelings.

A dead, brown plant in a blue pot sitting in front of a writing center schedule posted on the Writing Center table

Because we—and many of those we work with—have painful, difficult moments on a daily basis, we argue for the importance of discussing, exposing, and integrating vulnerability into our everyday writing center work, even as we know this practice is more difficult for some populations than others.

Marback argues that while we often see vulnerability as something to be hidden or overcome, we should instead reorient to seeing vulnerability “not as a weakness but as a strength, an attitude of care and concern that connects us to the world and to each other” (1). This approach sees vulnerability not as something to be hidden away in order to create a “positive” community space, and not, even, as something everyone gets to choose. Instead, it is something to be safely discussed, even when it is uncomfortable. Vulnerability can help to create a community more attuned to all bodies within it, which is (supposedly) at the core of writing center work. In exposing, discussing, and exploring vulnerabilities, we can begin developing social justice-oriented practices in a writing center .

Throughout this chapter, we interrogate what it means to be vulnerable consultants in the writing center. Vulnerability can feel like a loss of control, an irrational response that makes us ashamed, particularly in the academic spaces where we work and rely heavily on rationality as a guiding principle. Instead, we see vulnerability as “emotional involvement,” which “demands from us an acceptance of greater risk than is demanded by empathy” (Marback 7). While empathy is frequently integrated into our work as writing center consultants, vulnerability demands more. We’re often empathetic to those who come to us for help—we take time to understand their writing, why they are writing, the struggles they are having. But vulnerability asks us to also be forward about our own struggles, which can leave us feeling exposed and uncomfortable in interactions with co-workers and in sessions. We are not calling for everyone to always be vulnerable . Instead, we advocate for allowing space for vulnerabilities not to be seen as shameful when they do come forward at work.

This chapter is presented in three parts. First, Lauren, a former consultant at The Writing Center @ MSU (Michigan State University), discusses the need for care-based responses within the writing center to both spoken and silent vulnerability. Then Elise, former interim assistant director at The Writing Center @ MSU and current writing center director at University of North Carolina at Pembroke, presents photos she took of objects in MSU’s center that mark consultants’ and writers’ unspoken vulnerabilities. These photos are peppered throughout the chapter to give a sense of the vulnerabilities that people (including ourselves) express within the writing center in non-verbal ways. Next, we have Rachel’s stories. Rachel, former interim assistant director and current graduate coordinator at The Writing Center @ MSU, writes of having to publicly and vulnerably live through her grief while continuing with the important, everyday tasks of writing center work (Figure 3). Finally, we conclude with strategies for creating and discussing vulnerable moments in your own center.

lee is writing an essay on vulnerabilities

In Lauren’s research with trauma survivors, she advocates for care-based practices in all areas of our work, including research, teaching, writing program administration, and, of course, writing centers. Care-based practices include:

Prioritizing the building of safe and open communities ( Craig and Perryman-Clark ; Herman ; Yergeau )
Promoting empathetic listening ( Dolmage ; Laub )
Reflecting on positionality and relationality ( Cedillo ; Craig and Perryman-Clark; Powell et al. )
Sharing power and flattening hierarchical governance ( Guarino et al. ; Tuhiwai Smith )
Rebuilding networks of trust and care through care-based practices (Herman; Morales )

What we’ve learned from this model of care-based practices is that vulnerability is an active practice, one that we have to train both speakers and listeners to handle. Experiencing vulnerability is scary precisely because it is seen as weakness. We often hide our shame, our worry, our anger, our depression, and our grief from others because we fear the risks associated with being open. Likewise, we often fear being taken advantage of, being shunned, or being viewed as “difficult.” Many of us may not have a choice in that vulnerability; certain positionalities including race, sexuality, ability, class, and nationality are inherently more vulnerable than others, so these experiences and feelings may be heightened.

For listeners, vulnerability is scary because we don’t always know how to handle someone else’s pain, particularly when we aren’t trained as counselors. Even empathetic listeners can mess up by responding in seemingly dismissive ways that make vulnerable speakers feel unheard and unimportant. Therefore, engaging in the work of vulnerability means working to understand how we can make safe and open communities for both speakers and listeners to work together, trust each other, and care for everyone.

This leads us to a series of questions:

Why is vulnerability in writing centers important—what benefits are there to being vulnerable and acknowledging others’ vulnerabilities?
Where are these moments of vulnerability in writing center work?
When do we share our vulnerabilities, and when do we hide our vulnerabilities?
What is the difference between vulnerabilities that we feel as the result of life experiences and vulnerabilities that are part of our embodied identities?
How do we navigate vulnerabilities with both empathy and action?
What does it mean to be “vulnerable,” and does it look the same for everyone?

As part of responding to these questions, we take time to share our own vulnerabilities. While we reflect on these stories of vulnerability, we also relay ideas for how vulnerability can be integrated into writing center work, and how we can better respond to vulnerabilities as listeners, consultants, and co-workers. We hope to start a conversation on the vulnerabilities that we take into the writing center, as well as the vulnerability that the writing center as a space and practice puts on us. We conclude our chapter by providing activities for and examples of modeling vulnerability in your own writing center.

Lauren’s Story

Because it is mid-February in Michigan, I leave my apartment earlier than usual to make sure I have time to clear the snow off my car, navigate the half-cleared Michigan roads, and battle for a parking spot on campus before the lots are filled (a feat even more impossible in the cold, with more students driving rather than walking in the frigid temperatures and some spots taken up by the snow piles). Today, I am lucky and find a parking spot immediately, so I have time to grab coffee and arrive at my shift early. To pass the time before my appointments arrive, I log onto social media.

The first post I see notifies me that a friend of mine has died .

Immediately, I text a mutual friend to confirm the details. We quickly share stories and memories of our deceased friend and our frustration that we must mourn our friends before we are 30. Frustratingly, this is not the first time either of us has had to deal with death during the year—with the death of people our own age, other millennials who we probably just saw on Instagram or Snapchat the day before. Then, my appointment walks in, and I start a 4-hour writing center shift, where I have to shove aside my feelings and work with the writers who had scheduled appointments with me.

After my shift, I don’t get to fall apart—I’m on the job market, and I have an interview planned for the afternoon. So, I stay in the writing center, hoping the relatively public space will help me keep myself together until after I have to answer interview questions about my teaching and research and service—all of which, funnily enough, deal with issues of trauma and care and vulnerability. I’d love to be able to actually enact my research practices with the search committees, to be able to share the details of my life with them, to answer their call with “I just found out my friend died unexpectedly, and this is exactly why I do the work I do” instead of with a “hello,” but I know that doing so would probably mean that I don’t actually get that job . After my interview, I finally message some people in my program to say that my friend died and that I’ve been holding those emotions back all day.

Once I allow myself to feel these emotions, I think about the writing center as a space where I’d been forced to hide those feelings, to perform invincibility, to put on the mask and pretend nothing was going on for the writers who came in for help. Because I was trying to make sure I was caring for the writers I was working with, the mask of professionalism I wore meant that I was failing to care for myself and my emotions. In this way, the writing center felt like a space where I wasn’t allowed to be myself or to feel my own feelings.

But I then consider why I lingered in that space for an hour after my shift instead of going home, and I wonder if it is more complex than that. While I did not speak my vulnerabilities aloud, the writing center was still the space where I felt safe and comfortable in that moment, where I wanted to be in order to remain calm before an interview—it was a space of vulnerability, even if it was a silent vulnerability. The forced professionalism of the writing center, which felt stifling at first, ended up becoming a comfort to me as my shift ended. Because I knew I had to maintain my composure for the interview coming up, I found myself drawing on the writing center as a way to dwell in my emotions without being overwhelmed by them. I confessed what I was going through to a few other consultants who were there at the time, and who asked me how I was doing. They, in turn, offered their sympathies and support in ways that I needed. While I was silent about my feelings while working with writers, in the moment where I was no longer asked to act as a consultant (when my shift was over), I was able to start speaking my vulnerabilities.

Much of my work deals with silent vulnerabilities. Sometimes, this means considering how we can come to speak vulnerabilities and how we speak and story trauma, which carries many vulnerabilities. More recently, and for this project, I have become interested in how we as writing researchers, teachers, administrators, or consultants can support those who are vulnerable, whether we are aware of these vulnerabilities or not. In other words, the writing center may be a space for emotional vulnerability, a healing space as well as a consultation space. I’ve often found myself in the position of being a healer for writers who see themselves as “bad writers” or who don’t believe they can complete an assignment, but rarely have I felt that the center was a healing space for me. Indeed, the writing center seems set up to be a healing space for writers rather than tutors, as we often discuss how to navigate the feelings of those writers. What Elise, Rachel, and I consider here is how it can also be a potential healing space for those of us who work here.

To be clear, sometimes the writing center feels like another abuser , one that asks me to hang my vulnerabilities away at the door in order to work, invalidates my fears and worries, asks me to be professional and sees emotions as hindering that. In this way, writing centers mirror the institutions they are part of, the university settings wherein we are often asked to be students, faculty, and other professionals before we are asked to be people. But I believe that we do not need/have to feel this way in the center. This possibility can only be recognized as we open space for vulnerabilities, to not ask people to hang them at the door, to empathize with each other but also train our consultants to take action to help those who are vulnerable.

In my experience, writing center staff/administrators often pretend we’re not on fire. We put up images of “happy” writers and consultants on our webpages and tout our successes, but we ignore the failures that are all around us, including everyday feelings of depression, anxiety, and loss, or the general feeling of just being overwhelmed that many of us experience at some point (Figure 4).

Magnetic poetry on a blue background that says, “Thou art a mystery none know pleasure / none could hate / their surreal dreaming is a sublime nothing / why strive?”

But exposing vulnerabilities actually makes us a safer, and more honest, community. The writing center does not need to be a space that makes everyone “happy.” In trauma studies, we teach that rebuilding trust is often the exact opposite of making things “happy”: because trauma survivors know that happiness is often a façade, regaining trust is rooted in being open and honest about both personal vulnerabilities and institutional failings (Herman; Smith and Freyd ). I believe that the writing center (like many other institutional offices) has often failed survivors in its reticence to address trauma within its walls. Michigan State is in a particularly vulnerable moment in the wake of Larry Nassar , so the reluctance of any space to recognize sexual violence is an issue for all departments to consider. We cannot skip reflecting on our failures, to expose our own vulnerabilities instead of hiding or defending them. We don’t need to just put the “happy writer” stories on the writing center websites—we also need to put the things that show the bad, from the mundane struggles that writers may go through the recognition that writing centers exist within institutional settings that are often filled with harassment, discrimination, and violence.

Tell people how to address discrimination and make space for them to do so, because these stories emerge within the writing center spaces. Provide anti-harassment and intervention training to consultants as part of job training, because many of us who work here and the writers that we work with will experience these at some point. Acknowledge that a large amount of violence occurs within the universities most of us work for and work to address that problem within the writing center, providing university and community-focused resources for both ourselves and the writers who come to us with these stories to utilize.

Elise’s Story

Since 2007, I’ve worked in four different writing centers as a consultant, coordinator, and now interim assistant director. My experiences in each one have been different, but one constant has always remained: they have always been a place where messy things happen. Since writing centers often become a kind of hub for consultants to hang out, the writing center has served as a backdrop and setting for many everyday life moments for me. And I’m a grad student, which means I’ve seen some shit . Thus, writing centers have been a backdrop not just for my happy life moments, but also some of my darkest times. In undergrad, I used my job in the writing center as an excuse to avoid my abusive boyfriend. I’ve also been sexually harassed at two different writing centers, by both a man and a woman. I had a miscarriage in 2017, and the center was a setting for many conversations about my grief. I’ve had arguments. I’ve cried . I’ve hidden. I’ve experienced trauma in the writing center. It’s these everyday moments I want to discuss here.

Arguably, Geller et al.’s (2007) discussion of everyday moments hearkens to the positives of the center, to the way we all like to think of our centers: hubs of fun chit-chat, snack-eating, stimulating consultations, hilarious haikus composed in magnetic poetry, delicious treats left out for all. Of course, most, if not all, writing centers have these moments. But they also have other kinds of moments: moments where consultants and writers disagree or end sessions early; moments where a consultant quietly puts together an angsty poem on the magnet board (Figure 5); moments where no one remembers to water the plants (Figure 6), clean out the coffee pot, or throw away the dried-up markers; moments where our pain and vulnerability are only made visible through the traces we leave behind (Figure 7).

Magnetic poetry on a blue background that says, “Timid calm / like bold drunk rain under a symphony of regret.”

If the writing center is to be conceived of as a homey space, I think it’s only natural for us to think about the “dark” things that happen in home spaces: sexual harassment, death, abuse, tears.

When you have a miscarriage, you’re confronted with a lot of positive narratives about trying again, having a rainbow baby, or the notion that your baby is safe in heaven. None of these narratives brought me comfort or solace. Instead, I found the push for constant positivity to be hollow and stifling. In addition, after my miscarriage, I lived through the interminable wait for Michigan State’s Office of Institutional Equity to make a decision about a sexual harassment case (the setting of which was the writing center) that I filed. We often discuss the positivity to be found in an end result of a case like this, but what of all the negative feelings accompanying the weight (and wait) of it all? Where does that leave me or anyone else experiencing negative feelings in a writing center space often advertised as comforting and happy?

I find myself often seeking comfort under the blanket of bad feelings I have been so often encouraged to recover from or get over. Instead, I have found myself deep-diving into darkness as pure resistance against all the hope-filled narratives of rainbow babies, second chances, and babies in heaven. Last year, in solidarity with queer scholars like Lee Edelman , Ann Cvetkovich , Jack Halberstam , and Heather Love , I found myself holding on to my failure, my depression, my empty womb, my childless future, my traumatized body and spirit. Love argues that “‘feeling bad’ has been a crucial element of modern queer experience” (160) “given the scene of destruction at our backs” (162). Queerly reaching out into the writing center space, I looked (and continue to look) for evidence of some kind of solidarity in my own personal darkness. I have found that a reveling in the negative has often been my only queer comfort . Indeed, according to Cvetkovich, “it might. . . be important to let depression linger, to explore the feeling of remaining or resting sadness without insisting that it be transformed or reconceived” (14). Thus, if we are to consider the everyday moments of the writing center, it is important to think about the negative, sad, and dark everyday moments that occur in the center as well.

A jumble of cords, boxes, and miscellaneous technology in a very messy, neglected tech cabinet.

I found depressing poems constructed on the walls, neglected plants, broken chairs, leftover and ruined works of art, old abandoned toys, and more. If Geller et al. call for writing center scholars to “remain open to everyday moments” in the center (56), I argue we need to make sure we’re attending to the dark, heavy, sad, and angry moments as well. They have just as much a place in the center as happy ones. In examining the dark everyday moments of the center evidenced through our interaction with objects in the center, I believe we can develop a better understanding of our consultants’ and writers’ states of mind. In addition, examining the objects of our offices and other workspaces within the center can help us to name some of the vulnerabilities we have likely been trying to repress or ignore. For instance, as I walked around taking photos recently, our writing center director asked me to take a photo of the yet-to-be unpacked boxes in her office, evidence, she said, of a lack of time due to a difficult semester (Figure 10).

A stack of four orange and black plastic bins sits next to a messy bookshelf in our director’s office. These boxes are yet to be unpacked after seven months.

Taking time to attend to the hidden and invisible acts of vulnerability in the center can open up space for writing center staff to begin conversing about how and why we might be hiding our negative feelings in the center, or how our space might reveal what negative emotions or actions are present in our workspace. Such conversations allow us to begin cultivating an understanding of a center that is not always a positive space, but a much more complex community.

Rachel’s story

During a recent session with one of my regular writers, I noticed that she was paying particular attention to the tchotchkes on the table in front of us while getting ready for the session. This writer is a graduate student and former consultant herself, so this attention perplexed me, since these items seem very natural in this space. Suddenly, she turned to look at me and said with complete seriousness, “What’s with the tissues on all the tables? Is this for if we cry?” (Figure 11).

A felt board sign in Rachel and Elise’s writing center office that says “CRYBABIES WELCOME” with a heart between two frowny faces in the middle.

The tissues aren’t a new addition to our tables, so I was struck speechless for a moment.

“I mean, do they think we’re gonna start crying during sessions or something?” she said, and forced a laugh.

But then I noticed something. Instead of dismissing herself with the same nonchalant tone with which she brought up the conversation, she used the tissues on the tables as a way to segue into a disclosure of how she is handling the stress of the semester—one of her final ones for her doctorate—describing how she feels like she can’t display her emotions in academia as a Black woman, and mentioning some challenges in her personal life. I sat. I listened. Then, she turned to me, and she sincerely asked how I was.

What a can of worms , I thought before I contemplated whether I should be honest with her, or give her the routine “I’m okay” answer that I’d been giving everyone lately.

I paused while she stared at me, waiting, and I decided I was safe.

I decided to be vulnerable.

I started working in writing centers in 2002, and I’ve held the gamut of positions from peer tutor to administrator. Along with all the joys that writing centers have brought to my academic and personal lives, like meeting lifelong friends in nearly all of the four centers in which I’ve worked, what I think about more often is how my 17-year writing center tenure has been punctuated by moments of implosion and forced vulnerability. These moments occurred when the façade of my strictly-orchestrated life fell apart in ways that were publicly unavoidable, and in ways that forced me to embrace my vulnerability in the writing center despite my position—a somewhat unwelcome gesture in a fairly emotionally-charged space.

Two implosions have left the greatest marks on my writing center life. In 2013, I was serving as the assistant director of a writing center at a moderately-sized southeastern university. I started work there in 2010 after leaving a lateral position as a way to shake up my life and, I thought optimistically, provide the change needed to save my failing marriage. Little did I know then that simply moving states and jobs doesn’t change your life. Alas, in the summer of 2013, I got divorced, and as sometimes happens with divorce, I decided to return to my maiden name. I remember sitting in my office one day, tissues in hand and tears streaming down my face, as I talked to my program assistant and dear friend. I was trying to figure out how to tell my staff that I was no longer going by the name they all knew. I had a new/old name. For me, it felt like a welcome return, but the majority of my staff didn’t know what was going on in my personal life, and I worried about the best way of relaying such intimate information. Of course, throughout this process, I couldn’t hide my face; daily, I carried around on my body all I was going through with my puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks, and I’m sure my staff knew something was up.

After days of worry, I decided on an email simply and straightforwardly telling the staff what I was going through and what happened, to potentially head off any gossip that might occur. I chose to allow my colleagues into my life when I could have thrown up the walls around me even higher. Of course, my staff was empathetic, understanding, and welcoming of the new me; however, what I learned throughout this experience is that when we work in writing centers, we’re taught every aspect of how to care for our writers when they have meltdowns in our spaces, but we are rarely told how to care for ourselves when this happens . The needs of writing center tutors, administrators, and staff are made to feel secondary to the writers’ needs and desires, and I wonder if that’s how it should be.

Countless guidebooks and writing center training manuals show us what empathy toward a student looks like, but, perhaps ironically, they only relay one dimension of the friendly conversation that is encouraged in writing centers. Martini and Webster, in their introduction to The Peer Review special issue “ Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces ” make note of the absence of guidance, particularly in guidebooks and manuals, for actually moving through the writing center space when they say:

Although these guidebooks often recognize the power dynamics at play (i.e., between tutor, writer, and instructor) and may acknowledge that not all writers are the same (i.e., offering advice for working with multilingual writers, adult learners, writers with anxiety, basic skill levels, or disabilities), most of the advice is prescriptive. Little, if any, attention is paid to how practitioners might act in response to intersectional identities or to the complexity of power dynamics across difference.

What, then, do we do with our complex emotional needs and those of our staff in writing centers?

The second implosion happened in January of 2018, when my mother passed away. When it happened, thankfully, I was with her and my father. I’m close with our administrators in the current center where I work, and upon her passing, they sent out an email to our entire staff and departmental faculty telling them what happened. Similarly to when I needed to tell my staff about my name change in 2013, my personal life was again the subject of a staff email—this time, though, not of my own choosing, and not coming from me. While the email, and my own subsequent Facebook post of the obituary, meant that my close friends could reach out to me during this time, it also meant that I had to deal with the “sympathy stare” when I returned to school one week after her funeral: colleagues, classmates, and professors who had no idea what to say to me or what to do with my sadness, and just stared at me with unwanted sympathy in their eyes. I found myself meeting the stare dead-on in defiance or getting caught smiling and nodding to the sympathetic friend, a way to reassure them that I was, indeed, okay .

As prepared as I thought I was to handle what happened in a space where the source of my grief didn’t happen, I was not. Every time someone would lovingly ask me “How are you?” or do a double take at me in the center, or look away when I caught them staring at me, I fought back tears and the urge to run away. Sometimes I didn’t win the fight, and I just let the tears come. Many times I simply sat at a window-facing table in the main consulting area of the center and cried openly as I stared out the window. Most people were scared to talk to me and skittish around me; rarely did anyone know what to do with me in this public space; writers handled me with kid gloves when they saw my face. I didn’t know what to do with myself, either, but I figured if there was ever a time to cry in the center, this was it. Right on time, though, the deep, shaming voice inside me quietly said that I needed to get it together at work, that this wasn’t the place, that I should save my crying, emotions, and vulnerabilities for closed doors, that my emotions and my vulnerabilities were unwelcome in this space.

Particularly in unwelcome spaces—like academia, conferences, or anywhere public—vulnerability can be seen as a weakness rather than a kind of strength illustrated through an emotive action or experience (like tears, laughter, or anger). However, one can choose to see the act of vulnerability in unwelcome spaces as a diffraction of sorts: vulnerability breaks apart traditional (heteropatriarchal, academic, etc.) norms and expectations while stitching together the fragmented, emotional pieces of oneself that have been shattered by an event. The diffraction provides us with a new way of seeing ourselves. It shows us that “there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind” because it requires us to be honest and in touch with ourselves in ways that encourage us to remember the ‘old’ of our desires while living in the new” ( Barad 168).

Most days, I don’t know if I’m ready to live with the new yet, but I am okay with sitting in the muck of my current state, even when it makes most people around me uncomfortable. This means that some days I need to cry in the center. I need to use the tissues at the table without shame or worry. I need to be visibly vulnerable with the people around me.

As I sat with my returning, graduate student writer that day and looked at the now-very-obvious tissues on the table, I made a decision. I leaned nearer to her and whispered, “Do you know what’s been going on with me this semester?” I never really know the best way to broach this topic now, so I tiptoed.

“No,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee, “What’s going on?”

“My mom passed away in January.”

“WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU EVEN DOING HERE?!” she exclaimed.

I gave her a weak smile and said, “I’m not really sure,” as I grabbed a tissue from the box (Figure 12).

A large shredding bin, two ceiling tiles, and a broken lamp line an abandoned, messy hallway with an open supply closet in the center.

In our own experiences, our vulnerabilities showed up in unexpected ways while we had to continue doing the everyday work of the writing center. Sharing these experiences in this chapter is a step toward what we would like to see writing center scholars continue to do: see and mark their centers as spaces where vulnerability is enacted on a daily basis. We conclude, then, with strategies for enacting and discussing vulnerability in other writing centers, based on some of the care-based practices central to Lauren’s work.

At the beginning of this chapter, we asked:

What benefits are there to being vulnerable, and to acknowledging others’ vulnerabilities?
What do vulnerable moments mean, and how do we navigate them with both empathy and action?

Below, we share three ideas for how vulnerability can be integrated into writing center work, and how we can better respond to vulnerabilities as listeners, consultants, and co-workers:

Cathartic Worst-Case Scenario Dump

There are multiple ways to enact a cathartic worst-case scenario dump. The first is by teaching your consultants to approach their anxieties about the writing center head-on by naming them, walking through their worst-case scenarios and working backwards through them. During trainings, consultants could work through their worries about sessions by running through worst-case scenarios with each other and considering how they might respond if such events happen.

One worst-case scenario for a consultant might be working with a writer who brings in a paper that is offensive (e.g., one that makes discriminatory comments based on race, gender, sexuality, or ability). During a cathartic worst-case scenario dump, consultants could first name their fear for this session: that the writer brings in an offensive paper and they do not know how to address these offenses. Then, others would validate this worry while also discussing strategies and solutions. This allows the consultant to find a support system within the writing center for handling these kinds of moments—so that if a moment they fear were to arise, the consultant has both strategies and support around them.

Another way to perform the cathartic worst-case scenario dump is during actual writing center sessions. Specifically, consultants can be trained to handle writers’ anxieties by having mock sessions where the writer brings in a work with a major writing worry. Then, the consultant can ask the writer about their worst-case scenarios and help work through those with them.

For example, if a writer came in with clear anxieties, the consultant might pause a session to ask about their worst-case scenarios (e.g., “I won’t finish this paper in time and will fail the course”). Then, the consultant can help address the writer’s vulnerabilities directly by working through them: “Let’s help you brainstorm some ideas for this paper and create a timeline so that you can get something written and turn it in on time.” This allows the consultant to use the writer’s vulnerabilities to create a conversation, rather than stall it. By acknowledging their vulnerabilities, consultants show empathy but also make a plan of action that writers can put into place.

In both cases, the cathartic worst-case scenario dump is meant to allow consultants or writers to share their vulnerabilities and worries while also giving them support to work through these worries in community with others.

Crying as Praxis

Consultants are often taught how to handle writers’ emotions during sessions. Some writing center guidebooks teach us that one of the many hats we wear is that of counselor. We are told that during sessions where writers have extreme emotional reactions we should “offer support, sympathy, and suggestions” and make sure we’re offering students access to the appropriate campus resources ( Ryan and Zimmerelli 7-8). What is often left out of these scenarios is what happens when the consultant is the one having extreme emotional reactions. In these cases, we suggest that consultants be trained to handle themselves and their emotions with the same care and sympathy in which they would treat a writer, and to name those things when they happen during sessions or in the public spaces of the center. In other words, if a consultant feels like they might need to cry, don’t encourage them to rush out of the center to a private space; allow them to sit in the open and cry.

We understand that everyone handles their emotions differently. As writing center practitioners, we’re trained to understand this concept in sessions with writers (Ryan and Zimmerelli; Gillespie and Lerner ). What we’re suggesting here is that consultants could also be trained to feel comfortable enough to step out of sessions, ask for space or time off, or openly share their stories with people they feel safe with when they have emotional reactions in the writing center space.

Training consultants to be sympathetic and caring of themselves is not easy. There are no simple steps or heuristic, and for some, approaching sessions without the comfort of an invisible mask will feel impossible, or even unsafe. Training consultants to be sympathetic and caring of themselves is not easy. There are no simple steps or heuristic, and for some, approaching sessions without the comfort of an invisible mask will feel impossible, or even unsafe. However, when administrators and other senior writing center staff model emotional vulnerability during sessions and in their everyday work, the ethos of the center will shift to one where reciprocal emotional sympathy is accepted and the center will start to feel like a space that is safe enough for others to test the crying waters when they need to.

Let us offer a point of clarity here: modeling emotional vulnerability does not always have to mean crying in public. For some, this can be an unsafe public act. Instead, we’re advocating for consultants to feel comfortable expressing their emotions (in healthy ways) in the center. This could be through tears, but it could also be in heartfelt conversations, expressions of frustration, or giggle fits.

Capturing Evidence of Everyday Vulnerability

In a writing center training class or during a writing center staff meeting, ask consultants to take a few minutes to walk around the space of the writing center, taking pictures of objects that leave evidence of consultant or writer vulnerability (perhaps using the photos in this chapter as an example).
After writers have taken their photographic evidence, have them share their findings with each other in groups (Figure 13), making note of what they think the photographs say about the feelings of the people who made them, and why they might be feeling this way.

A magnetic poem against a blue and purple background that says “Despair / I trudge and stare / Bitter.”

Key Takeaway

Infographic with three steps to respond to vulnerability: model vulnerability, create space for public feelings, and capture evidence of vulnerability.

We can’t guarantee that your center will become more vulnerable if you enact the strategies we have shared, but we do hope that these practices might allow you the space to see where vulnerabilities can show up among consultants in your writing center. By creating deliberate opportunities for vulnerability in these ways, and in other ways, we believe that the writing center can become a more empathetic and responsive space. In addition, we believe that our deliberate act of sharing our own vulnerabilities as consultants and administrators can help start a conversation about the emotions of our consultants, instead of merely discussing the emotional needs of the writers who utilize our center. We—writing center administrators, consultants, and writers—come to the center with emotions and vulnerabilities; being invited to share these experiences can create more community.

Works Cited

Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart .” Parallax, vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pp. 168-87.

Caswell, Nicole I., Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors . Utah State UP, 2016.

Cedillo, Christina. “ What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy .” Composition Forum vol. 39, 2018. https://compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php

Craig, Collin Lamott, and Staci Maree Perryman-Clark. “Troubling the Boundaries: (De)Constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender .” WPA: Writing Program Administration , vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 37-58.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling . Duke UP, 2012.

Denny, Harry et al. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles . Utah State UP, 2019.

Dixon, Elise, and Rachel Robinson. “ Welcome for Whom: Introduction to the Special Issue .” The Peer Review , vol. 3, no. 1, 2019. http://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/welcome-for-whom-introduction-to-the-special-issue/

Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric . Syracuse UP, 2014.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive . Duke UP, 2004.

Geller, Anne Ellen, et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice . Utah State UP, 2007.

Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Learner. The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring . 2nd ed., Pearson, 2007.

Grimm, Nancy. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times . Heinemann, 1999.

Guarino, Kathleen, et al. Trauma-Informed Organizational Toolkit for Homeless Services . The National Center on Family Homelessness. 2009. https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Trauma-Informed_Organizational_Toolkit_0.pdf

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure . Duke UP, 2011.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror . Basic Books, 1997.

Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening .” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History , edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Routledge, 1991, pp. 57-74.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History . Harvard UP, 2009.

Marback, Richard. “A Meditation on Vulnerability in Rhetoric .” Rhetoric Review , vol. 29, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07350190903415149?journalCode=hrhr20

Martini, Rebecca Hallman, and Travis Webster. “ Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces: A Special Issue Introduction .” The Peer Review , vol. 1, no. 2, 2017. http://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/writing-centers-as-braver-spaces-a-special-issue-introduction/

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers . Utah State UP, 2012.

Morales, Aurora Levins. Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity . South End Press, 1999.

Powell, Malea, et al. “ Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics .” Enculturation , no. 18, 2014. http://enculturation.net/our-story-begins-here/

Rowan, Karen, and Laura Greenfield. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change . Utah State UP, 2011.

Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors . 6th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Smith, Carly, and Jennifer Freyd. “ Institutional Betrayal .” American Psychologist , vol. 69, no. 6, 2014, pp. 575-87. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-36500-001

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples , 2nd ed. Zed Books, 2012.

Yergeau, Melanie. “Saturday Plenary Address: Creating a Culture of Access in Writing Program Administration .” WPA: Writing Program Administration. vol. 40, no.1, 2016, pp. 155-65. http://associationdatabase.co/archives/40n1/40n1yergeau.pdf

In-Text Hyperlinked Notes

Vulnerability : We acknowledge here that public vulnerability comes more easily to us than to some of our colleagues and friends of color. There are many types of vulnerabilities; some vulnerabilities we all experience through individual life moments, but different embodied identities may also present vulnerabilities due to discrimination, harassment, prejudice, and other forms of violence. Two of us (Elise and Lauren) are members of the LGBTQ+ community, and Lauren is disabled; these identities do affect when, and if, we can be vulnerable in certain situations, just as our privileged identities that we have as white people make us less vulnerable.

Professionals : From Lauren: It’s also worth noting here that the standards of professionalism are rooted in sexist, racist, neurotypical, and ableist notions of emotional distance, and that instances where we show vulnerability (often coded as a feminine act) are seen as not fitting for the workplace.

Social Justice-oriented practices in a writing center : We draw from the work of writing center scholars like Harry Denny et al. and Karen Rowan and Laura Greenfield, who claim in their own ways that writing centers can be third spaces where issues of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and ability are meaningfully enmeshed in writing center conversations. We believe that writing centers, because of this liminal, third-space existence, are also spaces for those conversations to turn toward a social justice orientation.

We are not calling for everyone to always be vulnerable : It is the onus of the non-marginalized populations to create a safe enough space for these consultants to feel willing and able to discuss their vulnerabilities openly.

Care-based practices : For more discussion on care-based practices within university contexts, see the Two-Year College Association-Pacific Northwest’s 2019 newsletter, which outlines and discusses applications of trauma-informed values within institutional settings.

Died : From Rachel: Fortunately or not, for many of us, like Lauren and me, the writing center is often the space we’re in when alerted to bad or troubling news. The space then becomes filled with the (sometimes hidden) emotions of people experiencing this news.

I don’t actually get that job : From Elise: What I love about this is that you did get a job that values your vulnerability and trauma work. You get to be yourself there, be vulnerable in an academic space, and the students and faculty are better there for it.

Healing space : From Lauren: Here I use healing in a broad sense, recognizing the complexity and weight of the term. Many people prefer not to use “healing,” because it suggests that the vulnerability is a wound or a weakness to be covered up and disappeared, rather than something natural we use to learn and grow. I appreciate the idea of healing (-ing, not -ed) as a process rather than a state of being, however, and use the term to describe the interactions that we have with vulnerabilities and the process we go through to accept, work through, and live with these emotions.

Another abuser : From Elise: I certainly feel this, especially in this piece I wrote about sexual harassment and bisexuality a few years ago.

Larry Nassar : Larry Nassar is an American convicted serial rapist and sex offender, former USA Gymnastics national team doctor, former osteopathic physician, and former professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

For more information, visit https://www.michiganradio.org/post/timeline-long-history-abuse-dr-larry-nassar

I have seen some shit : From Rachel: Haven’t all of us graduate students seen some shit (some more than others, perhaps)?

Cried : From Lauren: The three of us also write about the specific act of crying in a forthcoming book chapter called “Crybabies in the Writing Center: Storying Affect and Emotion.” In it, we discuss crying as the same kind of vulnerable act we are calling for here, but also consider how crying comes with specific and complex power dynamics (who is crying and to whom?). But ultimately, crying, like many other forms of emotional vulnerability, presents opportunities to discuss social justice literacy, to form relationships and communities, and to reflect deeply on the emotions within our writing processes.

Michigan State’s Office of Institutional Equity : “MSU is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive community in which students, faculty, and staff can work together in an atmosphere free from all forms of discrimination and harassment. File a Report Now.”

For more information, visit this link: https://oie.msu.edu/

Queer Comfort : From Rachel: I think you’re right in that many times people disregard negative feelings in times of misery, grief, and discomfort to instead seek out “positive vibes” in an attempt to feel better, but I’m really glad you pushed against this and sat in your discomfort and sadness for a little while. I think it ultimately helped you deal with your trauma on a deep level.

Tchotchkes : Yiddish term for a small group of items that are decorative and/or otherwise disposable.

How to care for ourselves when this happens : From Lauren: This reminds me of the idea of vicarious traumatization, or the act of being traumatized by prolonged exposure to other people who are traumatized. This often occurs with therapists or emergency service workers, who are taught that their first priority is to the person they are responsible for rather than to themselves. Similarly, in our “professional” settings, we’re taught to think of ourselves as workers, consultants whose job it is to help the client, our writers. But what happens when we put ourselves aside in favor of caring for the other person?

Okay : From Elise: I remember this time very distinctly because I saw those smiles and stares as invitations to talk with you about your mom and your grief. While many people were avoiding you or giving you a “sympathy stare,” this is when our relationship began to evolve into a very close friendship.

Window-facing table : From Rachel: I now affectionately call this my “grief table” in the center.

We acknowledge here that public vulnerability comes more easily to us than to some of our colleagues and friends of color. There are many types of vulnerabilities; some vulnerabilities we all experience through individual life moments, but different embodied identities may also present vulnerabilities due to discrimination, harassment, prejudice, and other forms of violence. Two of us (Elise and Lauren) are members of the LGBTQ+ community, and Lauren is disabled; these identities do affect when, and if, we can be vulnerable in certain situations, just as our privileged identities that we have as white people make us less vulnerable.

From Lauren: It’s also worth noting here that the standards of professionalism are rooted in sexist, racist, neurotypical, and ableist notions of emotional distance, and that instances where we show vulnerability (often coded as a feminine act) are seen as not fitting for the workplace.

We draw from the work of writing center scholars like Harry Denny et al. and Karen Rowan and Laura Greenfield, who claim in their own ways that writing centers can be third spaces where issues of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and ability are meaningfully enmeshed in writing center conversations. We believe that writing centers, because of this liminal, third-space existence, are also spaces for those conversations to turn toward a social justice orientation.

It is the onus of the non-marginalized populations to create a safe enough space for these consultants to feel willing and able to discuss their vulnerabilities openly.

For more discussion on care-based practices within university contexts, see the Two-Year College Association-Pacific Northwest’s 2019 newsletter, which outlines and discusses applications of trauma-informed values within institutional settings.

From Rachel: Fortunately or not, for many of us, like Lauren and me, the writing center is often the space we’re in when alerted to bad or troubling news. The space then becomes filled with the (sometimes hidden) emotions of people experiencing this news.

From Elise: What I love about this is that you did get a job that values your vulnerability and trauma work. You get to be yourself there, be vulnerable in an academic space, and the students and faculty are better there for it.

From Lauren: Here I use healing in a broad sense, recognizing the complexity and weight of the term. Many people prefer not to use “healing,” because it suggests that the vulnerability is a wound or a weakness to be covered up and disappeared, rather than something natural we use to learn and grow. I appreciate the idea of healing (-ing, not -ed) as a process rather than a state of being, however, and use the term to describe the interactions that we have with vulnerabilities and the process we go through to accept, work through, and live with these emotions.

From Elise: I certainly feel this, especially in this piece I wrote about sexual harassment and bisexuality a few years ago.

Larry Nassar is an American convicted serial rapist and sex offender, former USA Gymnastics national team doctor, former osteopathic physician, and former professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

From Rachel: Haven’t all of us graduate students seen some shit (some more than others, perhaps)?

From Lauren: The three of us also write about the specific act of crying in a forthcoming book chapter called “Crybabies in the Writing Center: Storying Affect and Emotion.” In it, we discuss crying as the same kind of vulnerable act we are calling for here, but also consider how crying comes with specific and complex power dynamics (who is crying and to whom?). But ultimately, crying, like many other forms of emotional vulnerability, presents opportunities to discuss social justice literacy, to form relationships and communities, and to reflect deeply on the emotions within our writing processes.

"MSU is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive community in which students, faculty, and staff can work together in an atmosphere free from all forms of discrimination and harassment. File a Report Now."

From Rachel: I think you’re right in that many times people disregard negative feelings in times of misery, grief, and discomfort to instead seek out “positive vibes” in an attempt to feel better, but I’m really glad you pushed against this and sat in your discomfort and sadness for a little while. I think it ultimately helped you deal with your trauma on a deep level.

Yiddish term for a small group of items that are decorative and/or otherwise disposable.

From Lauren: This reminds me of the idea of vicarious traumatization, or the act of being traumatized by prolonged exposure to other people who are traumatized. This often occurs with therapists or emergency service workers, who are taught that their first priority is to the person they are responsible for rather than to themselves. Similarly, in our “professional” settings, we’re taught to think of ourselves as workers, consultants whose job it is to help the client, our writers. But what happens when we put ourselves aside in favor of caring for the other person?

From Elise: I remember this time very distinctly because I saw those smiles and stares as invitations to talk with you about your mom and your grief. While many people were avoiding you or giving you a “sympathy stare,” this is when our relationship began to evolve into a very close friendship.

From Rachel: I now affectionately call this my “grief table” in the center.

Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work Copyright © 2021 by Genie Nicole Giaimo; Kristi Murray Costello; Benjamin J. Villarreal; Lauren Brentnell; Elise Dixon; Rachel Robinson; Miranda Mattingly; Claire Helakoski; Christina Lundberg; Kacy Walz; Sarah Brown; and Yanar Hashlamon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Just a Writer Who Moms

Exploring Vulnerability in Writing

Hold it up to the light — the experience, I mean. Turn it around, mentally, and see it from all the angles. Take it in, process it, learn its nuances and curves. Then pour it all onto the blank page.

That’s what creative nonfiction writers do in essays. They examine the experience, give prose to the unspoken and open a door for others to see in or relate. To do this well, one needs to be open, vulnerable, willing to see both the good and the bad.

We are not ostriches sticking our heads in the sand. We do not turn out backs on the hard things.

As a writer, I tackle a lot of hard subjects: trauma , recovery, death, mass shootings. People see the vulnerability in my writing, they feel my emotions as they are translated into words on a page.

But for me, these are elements of my everyday life. The hard subjects are part of the fabric of my human condition. And I explore them in writing because it both gives me peace to work out the challenges on paper and stokes my curiosity. The vulnerability comes naturally — but only with that which I am ready to share.

I am constantly curious if we are normal. Are our experiences shared by others? Can those who’ve survived things, as we have, relate?

But vulnerability isn’t reserved for only the hardest of experiences. It’s essential for good essays on a variety of subjects — love, parenting, relationships, even food.

In fact, in some ways, those subjects are even more challenging. Instead of being pegged to something universally important — tragedies or news, for instance — they are pegged to the everyday human experience. Will others find a connection in the topic? Will they disagree with you or what you did?

When I was writing an essay that recently appeared in AARP’s The Girlfriend , this was the case. The subject is close to my heart. But would others find something valuable in my words?

The essay was about the end of a valued friendship and how I feel responsible for it. Part of me wondered if it was too personal, too specific to me. Part of me wondered if I was even entitled to share the story. But I felt compelled to — it’s a piece I’ve worked on for more than two years, honing, trimming, rewriting.

It was rejected six times. It received one offer from a paying outlet to publishing it without compensation. I declined. But then, I tried once more and an editor loved it. We entered into contract. It was published several months later.

But even the editor’s enthusiastic response didn’t quelch the anxiety of letting this piece of me into the public.

And that’s the rub of this style of writing. For it to be well-done, it needs that vulnerability. But that vulnerability leaves you raw and exposed. If you’re lucky, the reader response calms your nerves. Eventually.

As it turned out, my friendship essay was very well received. I was the appreciative recipient of emails, comments and texts from people who both related to and appreciated the work. They’d been through similar things. Some even shared their stories.

I’d turned the subject around with my words and eviscerated it from all sides. I was vulnerable in my sheer honesty.

How to explore vulnerability in writing

Just Write — The first draft should be just words flowing from you onto the screen. Remember: a first draft is just that. You have future drafts to hone the message.
Don’t Censor Yourself — This goes hand-in-hand with the first tip. Push your internal censor to the side and just let everything come out in your draft. You can always cut things later, but this immediate vulnerability is key to giving yourself enough to work with.
Be Honest with Yourself — As humans, we have a natural tendency to tell ourselves what we want to hear and to hide our truths that we think will make others think less of us. Again, let go of this tendency and just let the words — the truths — flow.
Step Away — Once you’ve got that first draft down, step away from your writing for a few hours or a few days. Whatever works for you. Return to it with fresh eyes. That will allow you to read it more fully.
Consider the Reader — Could your words or your openness help someone? What would you have wanted to read when you were in the situation you’re writing about? These are things to consider as you self edit.
Ask Yourself: Am I Willing to Have This Read? — Forget your fears of nasty comments and unkind emails. Will this writing help someone? Will it open a window into something others might not think about or be aware of? Consider that. At the same time, consider how your loved ones and religious leaders (if you have them) might receive it. This shouldn’t be a deal-breaker — unless it unnecessarily will hurt someone without helping anyone. All the same, these folks might need a heads up.
Polish It Without Removing the Soul — In other words, think like an editor. Your goal in self-editing isn’t to take out all the parts you are scared to share. Those are probably some of the best and most valuable parts. Instead, your goal is to make the piece flow in a way that will keep readers reading to the end.

Vulnerability, you see, is the secret to good writing. If you are willing to wade through the tremendously difficult parts to expose that which is important, your writing will be all the better for it.

Hi. I’d love to read your article about friendship you reference here, but the link to AARP comes up empty. Is there someplace else online I can find it? Thank you!

Thank you so much for letting me know. I dug up the new URL. It can be found here: https://www.thegirlfriend.com/relationships/how-i-lost-touch-with-my-best-friend

Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy

Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Research Centre for Agency, Values, and Ethics

Professor of Clinical Ethics,Department of Philosophy and Australian School of Advanced Medicine

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Philosophy

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This volume breaks new ground by investigating the ethics of vulnerability. Vulnerability is a central feature of human existence. Although its normative significance is recognized in moral theory and in bioethics, there has been little systematic analysis of the concept of vulnerability. The aim of this volume is to open up reflection on the nature of vulnerability, the responsibilities owed to the vulnerable, who bears these responsibilities, and how they are best fulfilled. In canvassing responses to these questions, the contributors engage with a range of ethical traditions and with issues in contemporary political philosophy and bioethics. Some essays in the volume explore the connections between vulnerability, autonomy, dignity, and justice. Other essays engage with a feminist ethics of care to articulate the relationship between vulnerability, dependence and care. These theoretical approaches are complemented by detailed examination of vulnerability in specific contexts, including disability; responsibilities to children; intergenerational justice; and care of the elderly. The essays thus address fundamental questions concerning our moral duties to each other as individuals and as citizens. This volume contributes significantly to the development of an ethics of vulnerability and opens up promising avenues for future research in feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy, and bioethics.

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Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy

Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy , Oxford University Press, 2014, 318pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199316656.

Reviewed by Joan C. Tronto, University of Minnesota

With Natalie Stoljar, Catriona Mackenzie edited one of the most influential collections of essays in feminist theory in the past two decades. In this collection, Mackenzie and her co-editors, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, have produced another volume that will be important for decades to come. It explores many dimensions of the concept of vulnerability and argues for its centrality as a concept in ethics. Within Anglo-American philosophy, given the centrality of such concepts as autonomy and agency, vulnerability has not been given much attention. Around 30 years ago, Robert Goodin wrote a justification for social welfare spending that extended to liberal political theory a consequentialist argument for "protecting the vulnerable." Goodin's idea proved widely influential, providing a basic justification whose title made it almost intuitively clear. Susan Okin, in Justice, Gender and the Family , was among the liberal theorists of justice who took the idea to be entirely persuasive. While many have since provided critiques of Goodin, the idea of "the vulnerable" went long unexplored in Anglo-American ethics.

The introductory essay makes many significant contributions. "What is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?" provides an account of why the co-editors are arguing for the centrality of this concept, but also why we now need a set of guideposts to help understand the concept. Vulnerability, they observe, has both universal and specific sets of meanings. "An important motivation of theorists who highlight the universality of inherent ontological vulnerability," they write, referring to such thinkers as Judith Butler, "is to focus attention on the need to reframe some of the founding assumptions of contemporary moral and political theory" (4). Yet another use of the term, such as Goodin's, "focuses on the contingent susceptibility of particular persons or groups to specific kinds of harm or threat by others" (6). How can one term do all of this work?

The editors propose that both of these ways of thinking about vulnerability are useful, and therefore we need a taxonomy to distinguish "distinct but overlapping kinds of vulnerability" (7). The taxonomy they offer is somewhat complex: it consists of three different sources of vulnerability and two states of vulnerability. The three sources include inherent vulnerability (those universal vulnerabilities intrinsic to the human condition), situational vulnerability (those that arise from context), and pathogenic vulnerability (situational vulnerabilities that arise from significant oppression or injustice, or "when a response intended to ameliorate vulnerability has the paradoxical effect of exacerbating existing vulnerabilities or generating new ones" (9)). Dispositional vulnerability represents a possible vulnerability (e.g., all women of child-bearing age might become pregnant) while occurrent vulnerability has actually happened (8-9).

From this complex taxonomy, the editors ask whether vulnerability by itself produces obligations, or whether vulnerability serves "as a signal that alerts us to obligations arising from other moral claims, such as those of harm or need" (10). They suggest that using vulnerability as a grounding for obligation allows us to critique contractarian notions of liberal theory, but is open to lines of criticism that are less severe when obligations are based, instead, on a notion such as need. They then observe that theories of justice need to answer such questions as who is responsible for dealing with vulnerability and how to address the problem that dealing with vulnerability often may produce further victimhood. Many of these questions have been addressed by theorists of care, but the advantage of starting from vulnerability is to place them into another and perhaps more familiar ethical framework.

In a second essay, Mackenzie addresses "The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability." This important essay offers a powerful critique of another protagonist of universal vulnerability, Martha Fineman. Fineman's work has emphasized vulnerability as an alternative to the overly self-reliant autonomous individual, for example, in The Autonomy Myth . Mackenzie suggests that with a more refined account of relational autonomy, vulnerability and autonomy are not opposites but mutually important elements of a fully human life. She 'distinguishes, though, between the libertarian accounts of autonomy that are Fineman's real target and a fuller account of autonomy "understood as both the capacity to lead a self-determining life and the status of being recognized as an autonomous agent by others" as "crucial for a flourishing life in contemporary liberal democratic societies" (41). Invoking the notion of capabilities also helps to fill in how the capabilities approach fits within this liberal democratic framework.

Not all people are autonomous throughout their lives, though; some people are dependent. Susan Dodds' excellent "Dependence, Care and Vulnerability" helps to address the question of who are dependent and how they fit into a framework of vulnerability and autonomy. Drawing on the work of Margaret Urban Walker and Eva Kittay, Dodds argues that dependency occurs when care is necessary to solve problems of vulnerability. She agrees with Walker that assigning responsibilities for such care is a complex process, but she disagrees with Kittay that caregivers are inevitably placed in a situation of dependency (though they are in other ways vulnerable). Dodds thus considers some clarifications about the nature of care and highlights the problem of pathogenic vulnerability if care workers abuse or do not respect their clients.

Another important essay that builds from the original tensions in the universal-particular taxonomy is Jackie Leach Scully's "Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power." Scully also highlights the differences between vulnerability understood as universal (or "global") and "contingent" vulnerabilities. She notes that for disabled people, accepting one or the other of these views creates a dilemma; they often find themselves in situations where they need to think about both kinds of vulnerability, not one or the other. One of the most interesting claims she makes, in the section that asks "Exactly What Are Disabled People Vulnerable To?", is what she calls Ascribed Global Vulnerabilities, i.e., "the tendency on the part of the nondisabled to extrapolate a genuine vulnerability in one area of a disabled person's life (e.g., physical weakness, economic precariousness) to a globally increased vulnerability stretching over the entirety of that person's life" (209). The concerns of disabled people present a concrete case about why these philosophical issues of defining vulnerability are so critical.

The rest of the essayists do not employ this taxonomy to address questions about vulnerability. Many of them deploy a conception of vulnerability to address other moral issues. For example, in "The Role of Vulnerability in Kantian Ethics," Paul Formosa shows that "there is no reason why vulnerability cannot play an important role in Kantian ethics" (95). Indeed, he goes further and notes that we are all susceptible in a broad sense of vulnerability "to being used as a mere means by others" (103). He also observes that Kantian ethics would ask us to be more attentive to those who are "narrowly" more vulnerable as well. Drawing on theories of recognition, Joel Anderson shows how exercising our autonomy requires recognition by others in order to make those exercises fully realized and that autonomy and vulnerability to others are "entwined." Wendy Rogers describes the place of the concept of vulnerability in contemporary bioethics. Margaret Urban Walker explains the difficulties of reparations as recreating a "moral vulnerability" among the victims. Marilyn Friedman uses the notion of vulnerability to make a case for the injustice of the ways in which women who are subject to domestic violence are often held responsible for failing to protect their children from their own abusers. Mianna Lotz notes the vulnerability of children to their parents' values. Amy Mullin considers the special needs of children for care, and the collection ends with an essay by Rosemarie Tong on the needs of aging people from the standpoint of vulnerability. Each of these essays does a fine job of illuminating the ways in which vulnerability helps us to understand morally difficult situations in a new light.

This collection illustrates the usefulness and diversity of the concept of vulnerability. The editors did not press upon the authors a single notion of vulnerability, and the volume is probably stronger for these divergent ways of thinking about vulnerability. Although the universal and particular forms of vulnerability play off against one another throughout the volume, there is no message, save the importance of this idea, that links the volume together.

In their introduction, Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds note that "A notable feature of the philosophical literature on vulnerability . . . is the diversity of background moral theories within which the concept has been analyzed" (17). While this is true, and while the essays represent various strands of feminist, Kantian, and relational moral theory, some elements of the diversity of these originary moral theories are not fully represented. Many continental writers on vulnerability emphasize other aspects of universal vulnerability, the fragility of life, for example, which lead them in different directions. The emphasis on liberal democratic moral and political theories may have flattened a question about whether vulnerability is best described as leading to obligations. Some feminist scholars who have emphasized human vulnerability, for example, might suggest that vulnerability leads directly to concerns about responsibility, rather than having to go through a two-step process in which obligations are acknowledged and then responsibility is assigned. The "protection" that vulnerability seems to call forth may require further analysis as well. As Sara Ruddick long ago noted, sometimes the response to vulnerability is care, sometimes the response to vulnerability is aggression. Thinking through issues of autonomy, vulnerability and violence remain part of the future agenda raised by this volume.

In all, though, this is a remarkably rich and important collection that will soon become essential reading in contemporary feminist and moral philosophy.

REWRITING THE RULES

Embracing failure in work, hom.., showing your working: on writing vulnerable, remembering audrey: another me...

by Meg-John Barker

Now that I’m a full-time writer (yes, I did it!) I’m thinking even more than I did before about the process of writing. Something that comes up a lot around my own writing – and in my work with clients as a writing mentor – is vulnerability. I shared a post last week that was pretty vulnerable in terms of content , so I thought I’d follow up with one about the process of writing and sharing vulnerable work. I’m guessing that a lot of the stuff that I cover here will also apply to other forms of creativity too.

Writing is a vulnerable act. This is one of the many things that it has in common with sex (which needs to be the topic of a whole further blog post). When you write, you’re putting yourself out there – exposed. Even people who are doing pretty safe forms of writing – where there’s nothing personal in there and where every statement is backed up with facts and figures or references to other peoples’ work – still feel massively vulnerable. We’re scared of getting it wrong, we can easily imagine every possible critical comment, we fear being ‘found out’ in relation to how little we know and/or how poorly we write, we compare ourselves to other writers who we admire and we can’t possibly measure up because our voice is not their voice.

Writing about vulnerable stuff

How much more vulnerable then when we’re writing about things that we, ourselves, feel vulnerable about. I felt that heavily last year when I was finishing the writing for my new graphic guide on gender . It struck me just how much of what I was writing about was deeply personal and painful: Writing about trans during the trans moral panic ; about #MeToo as a survivor; and about intersectional feminism when I’m so aware that I’ll inevitably perpetuate the very systems I’m challenging at times, because of the things that I don’t see in the areas where I’m privileged .

And then there’s writing more directly about our personal lives. This has come up with several clients lately. One worries that describing his daily moments will be read as egocentric – that it’s not doing anything for anybody else – even though it’s the writing he feels so passionately drawn to. Another fears what limits may be put on their activism, or their future career, if they write as openly about their own experience as they’d like to. I’m surprised when another client doesn’t see the link between the memoir-style posts that they write, and the writing that I do. I feel like my own vulnerabilities are starkly apparent in much of what I write, but perhaps the critical self-help style that I generally use obscures them somewhat.

The challenge from that client spurred me on to publish a few of the more vulnerable blog posts that I’ve been holding back on: ones that are more directly related to my own life and my own struggles. I put one out there last week. The feelings on publishing a more personal post always follow a familiar path. First a fizzy nervous feeling: ‘did I really do that?’ Then a fear of negative repercussions. Then a few comments come back: people saying that they connected with what I wrote, that it was just what they’d needed to read on that particular day, that they share that experience and it left them feeling less alone, that it helped them to reflect on their own lives. Those comments help me feel less alone and more connected right back. And I’m reminded that it’s nearly always the more vulnerable things that I write that get that kind of response.

I’m reminded of something Mollena Williams-Haas said in this talk : How creating from our most vulnerable places often leads to the best work we can do – for ourselves and for each other. It’s often higher quality, connecting creator and audience on a more visceral level, and it’s one of the best ways in which we can be of service to our communities. I love the way that Mollena links submission to vulnerability to activism in this way, it’s something that resonates deeply for me too. In fact that talk is an excellent example of what I’m talking to because she went for the vulnerable, open approach – weaving together the erotic and the creative – and it spoke to me so much that I remember it to this day.

Showing and telling

One of the classic pieces of advice to aspiring fiction writers is ‘show, don’t tell.’ Readers don’t want to be told the main character is a cocky piece of work who hides an inner vulnerability, they want to see that from the way he strides across the bar in the first scene, oh-so-casually glancing around to check that everyone is clocking him.

So is there a value to showing rather than telling in non-fiction too? I guess the writing that I do which I experience as most vulnerable is the stuff where I show my workings, rather than just telling the reader that this is something I struggle with too.

When I first wrote Rewriting the Rules the main place that I did this was the conflict chapter. I illustrated that with a detailed description of the kind of excruciating conflicts that I’ve had in partner relationships. In the second edition I added much more detail about my own relationship patterns in the love chapter, in order to demonstrate how these come from a combination of wider cultural messages, and our own lived experiences growing up with these messages all around us.

Nowadays I do a few kinds of vulnerable writing. I write more memoir-style pieces where I reflect on something I’ve been through, or am personally struggling with, or attempting to put into practice at the moment. I write fiction which is well summed up by this person on twitter.

I also create comics and zines about aspects of my experiences.

Generally I use the personal sharing I do in such writing as an example: this is how you could do this kind of work, this is how you could understand how our experiences shape our habits, here’s a practice you might try. But sometimes I let the showing stand alone. Perhaps there’s not always the need to tell as well as show.

When is vulnerable too vulnerable?

This is complicated territory because writing from the vulnerable place is also risky. You could end up hurting yourself by trying to write about something which is still too raw and painful. The writing could stray into something over-sharing or self-focused in a way that doesn’t really connect with others. This is particularly likely if you’re still very caught up in the details of what happened in that particular situation. It could feel too vulnerable if people respond critically to it once you’ve put it out there.

There’s some kind of balance to be struck between the value of writing about what’s live when it’s live – the authenticity and sense of aliveness that kind of writing can have – and the wisdom of knowing when something needs more time before you approach it creatively – either in order to be safe enough for yourself, or for it to take a form that others can connect with.

On our podcast Justin and I often come up with ideas we’d love to cover but they feel too live for us – or for others in our lives – at the moment. We keep a list on our phones of topics that would be great to cover, but we want to come back to them when it feels like we have a bit more distance from them ourselves.

Another thing I do is to journal about the things that are really live initially in a format which is not for public consumption. I’ve filled hundreds of pages in the last year, going through major transitions in work, home, and relationships. Many of the ideas and practices that have come out of this writing will likely eventually find their way into my non-fiction and fiction writing, but it’s probably best that the writing I do for the initial processing is for my eyes only.

There’s an inner sense of ‘not ready’ and ‘ready’ which I’m beginning to trust in this – and other – aspects of life. For example, there will hopefully eventually be seven comics in this series , but this is the only one that’s felt complete enough to get down so far.

If something starts to take shape as a piece of writing for a reader beyond yourself you can always write it when live and return to it later. It’s a great idea anyway to separate the writing process and the editing process. This means that in the first drafting you can really sink into the flow and write it however it comes, knowing that you’ll be coming back to it before it goes out anywhere, so you can free yourself up to make mistakes and be imperfect. This is what Anne Lammot calls the ‘ shitty first draft ’ – something we’re allowed to do in writing and in life .

Personally I find it helpful to have a notepad or extra document open alongside my writing, where I write down the worried or critical thoughts I have about while I’m doing it: from information I need to check to issues around diverse representation. Then I know I can go back to those concerns during the editing process, but can park them and keep writing for now.

When I’ve written something and it has that feeling of potentially being too raw, or too vulnerable, to put out there at present, I leave it and return to it later: a month, a year, whatever.

I also have a sense of who my crew are for reading things that I’ve written which I’m not sure about sharing. If you know that the future version of yourself, plus several friends, will be reading the writing and feeding back about it before it sees the light of day, that can also help you to feel more free to write now.

Over time you can get a feel for what is just the right amount of vulnerable and what is over the line. Like if the exposure scale goes from 0-10 perhaps 5-6 is that sweet spot for things that are real and vulnerable in ways that stretch you a useful amount, and will likely connect with other people. But over a 7 is into the too-vulnerable zone and worth leaving till it feels less live. I’ve adapted this from an idea I got from Love Uncommon , that when our feelings are 0-7 the thing to do is to stay with them , but over 7 has tipped us into trauma/overwhelm and the thing to do there is to get back to a sense of being safe-enough before we try to stay with the feelings.

Here’s a few things people often worry about when writing about vulnerable stuff, plus my thoughts on them:

What if…people hate it?

I figure for everything I write there’s going to be a few folks who’ll really love it – the ones for whom it hits just the right point on the right day. Now that I have quite a lot of people who regularly engage with my stuff, there’ll probably be quite a few others who like it, which is great. Then there will be the vast, vast, vast majority of the world who have no idea who I am, no wish to read my stuff, and would feel pretty meh about it if they ever did. Then there’ll be a few people who – if they did read it – would totally hate it, either because they hate me – or people like me – or because it’s the opposite of what they think, or because they’re just having a bad day – or whatever.

In my case I’m generally writing for the people who find my stuff interesting, useful, or entertaining. Nobody else has to read it. If they do, and they don’t like it then that’s okay, they don’t have to read my stuff again.

What if…people are mean about me?

I think that people imagine that this will happen a lot if they put stuff out there, but it’s actually pretty rare. I write on some fairly controversial topics and I’ve very rarely have someone attack me or criticise my writing. It has happened, but to be honest it’s usually been something out of left field that I could never have predicted. I wouldn’t have avoided the experience by deciding not to write about the vulnerable stuff.

It’s definitely worth having some plans in place – if you write publicly – about what you’ll do if you do find yourself being criticised or attacked in a big way. Is there somebody who can take over your inbox and social media during the time it’s going on? Could you get away and do self-care till it’s died down a bit? Is there a holding message you can prepare in advance to put out while you take your time responding – if a response is required? Can you think advance of some kinds of filters to decide which kinds of critical feedback you’d like to take seriously and which you wouldn’t (around who gives it, in what form, what kind of issue it raises, etc.)?

What if…I change my mind later?

People worry that once you’ve written something it’s somehow set in stone and you could be judged for it FOREVER. I think it would be great if we could make a habit of returning to things we’ve written in the past and say how our views have shifted, or what we know now that we didn’t know then. We’re all in an ongoing process, and it’s not fair to judge a person now by who they were or what they knew 5, 10 or 20 years ago. Also culture is moving on and this makes it more possible to do better on many issues today than we might’ve done in the past. We could reflect on this process of change in our writing in useful ways – being accountable for the impact of our work – instead of being defensive and insisting that every word we’ve ever written was perfect.

What if…it’s vulnerable for other people I’m writing about?

This is where consent comes in (I said writing was like sex in more ways than one). If you’re writing about other people then it’s not okay to put something out there that could leave them vulnerable without their consent. There are several options here:

Only write your story, not those of other people who might struggle to read themselves depicted, or to have themselves read about by others. Having had the experience of being reported about in the press twice without my consent I know very well how utterly traumatic, confusing, and powerless this experience can feel. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
Keep things general rather than specific.
Anonymise people (like I did when mentioning my clients earlier).
Have consent conversations with people you would like to write about. Remember to acknowledge the power you have in the situation and any pressure they might feel under to agree to it: Ideally give them several options rather than just ‘go ahead’ or ‘don’t do it’. Take anything other than a definite ‘yes’ as a ‘no’. Remind them it’s fine to change their mind at any time (ongoing consent).
Write collaboratively with the other people concerned so that you all have control over it together – this could be a useful process anyway.
Write it as fiction rather than non-fiction, changing all identifying features, combining people together, or completely making up characters but keeping features of the experience true to life. This is what a lot of therapists do when they want to write about client work without breaking confidentiality. It’s what Alex and I do when we want to write a bunch of diverse experiences around an issue in our collaborative books .

There are complexities around all this of course when it comes to memoir writing particularly: what constitutes writing about somebody else versus telling your story? Again it can be useful to give yourself complete freedom to write what comes in the first draft, and then decide which strategies – or combinations of strategies – you’ll use to keep it ethical when you’re editing.

What if…I get something wrong?

You can go gradual. It’s not a binary of keeping something to yourself or putting it out there for all to see. You can have trusted friends read it first to give you a sense if it’s something worth sharing more widely. You can have sensitivity readers who you offer something to in return for reading it with an eye to particular aspects you want to be sure you’ve got right (e.g. axes of oppression you’re not personally familiar with but have written about, or science or history parts). If you have a publisher then you’ll have at least one editor who will read it before it goes out there. If it’s a blog then you can always share it only with a certain group of people, or put it out publicly but only share it with your social media friends or followers initially. And if you do get something wrong you can acknowledge that and change it immediately if it’s online, or in a later edition if it’s in print.

Writing vulnerable

Why would we write vulnerable stuff given all of these fears and potential pitfalls? I think that it does something very important for us personally, and for others reading our work.

Personally there is what Patrick Califia calls an antidote to shame in writing vulnerable stuff. This is often the stuff that we fear – deep down – might not be okay about us. Writing it and putting it out there is a way of saying ‘this is me, with all my inevitable frailties and failings and flaws, and I’m still okay.’ Under capitalism it could also be seen as a political act to challenge the success/failure and good/bad person binaries by speaking openly about our struggles, our mistakes, and our messes.

Related to this, writing vulnerable goes against the current pressure to curate and present a perfect image on social media and beyond (which brings with it a horror of being revealed as imperfect, which we inevitably are).

For me it’s always been about resisting the common depiction of the ‘self-help author’ or ‘expert’ who has it all together and doesn’t struggle in the way that ‘regular people’ do. Fuck that noise quite frankly. We hardly need another point of comparison to judge ourselves against and find ourselves wanting in the current climate. If we only put out our successes and triumphs and never our struggles and tragedies we’re feeding that culture of comparison. So we’d better get vulnerable.

Or we can sidestep the whole thing entirely as I do on Instagram and only share images of lovely nature/animals and food I’ve cooked (yes I am quite a good cook, but I’m rubbish at loads of other things I promise).

Meg-John Barker

Meg-John (MJ) Barker (they/them) is a writer, zine-maker, collaborator, contemplative practitioner, and friend. They are the author of a number of zines and popular books on sex, gender, and relationships, including graphic guides to Queer, Gender, and Sexuality (with Jules Scheele), and How To Understand Your Gender, Sexuality and Relationships (with Alex Iantaffi).

Queer Storytelling

More free books – happy new year!

Zine-Maker: The Gift of Zines

Thank you for your wisdom and insight. It really helps me in my journey and deciding what to write, what not to and how to deal with the inner and outer critics.

Thankyou. I have so much more coming on the topic of the inner critic 🙂

Such a good read. Reminded me of all the people who tell me (and myself included) that they are put off writing articles for their professional bodies as they couldn’t bear the negative letters printed the following month! off to try and embrace the vulnerability and do it anyway ……….

I’m so glad you enjoyed it Carol. I do also think that such journals often fail in their ethical obligations to writers – both in the review process if there is one, and in the letters they print. There’s legitimate discussion and then there is the kind of letter they sometimes print for ‘debate’ which can be the painful equivalent of internet trolling. I wish editors would insist on compassionate critique only and remember the toll this can take on people – as well as often meaning the only people who write are from more privileged groups who are familiar/robust with that kind of debating style. Such a shame when people get put off writing. I do hope you’re treated kindly.

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Memoir coach and author Marion Roach

Welcome to The Memoir Project, the portal to your writing life.

The Role of Vulnerability in Writing

AS SOMEONE WHO TEACHES online memoir classes, I take a lot of questions on the fly. And, I admit, after all these years, I have many ready-made answers to those questions I’ve been asked repeatedly. Every once in a while, though, comes a question that penetrates to the heart of what every memoir writer must know, and stops me, causing me to acknowledge that not only have I never been asked this before, but that I will need to pull from some new place to provide an answer. This was the case recently, on a large, open online class, when someone asked, “how important is vulnerability in writing?”

I bowed my head and heard myself reply, “It’s everything.”

Because it is.

Why Do We Resist Vulnerability?

I am a huge believer in reporting on one’s life when writing memoir. I teach a webinar about it and talk about it all the time in The Master Class , and elsewhere, and practice it every day. The single greatest cure for any kind of writers’ block or stuck-ness is research, which is merely another name for reporting.

So, instead of just asking myself about the role of vulnerability in writing, I reached out to my friend Marsh Rose , an author and writer of considerable talent in her own right, and a licensed therapist, with whom I’ve sorted some of life’s deeper questions.

She reminded me that vulnerability “is one of the least appealing emotions we want to have,” which is why we avoid it when writing. She pointed out that when reading about vulnerability, “it taps into our own in a safe way,” but that when we write about it, it can feel “out of control.” As a result, we resist.

Makes sense, right?

What is Vulnerability?

All too often we associate vulnerability with weakness. Do you do this? You might. And if you so, it is hurting your memoir writing since it’s only when you go deep that you get the goods.

So, let’s attempt to Greenlight your vulnerability and use it to your best advantage, and let’s start by considering these words by poet David Whyte.

“Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding under-current of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature.”

He has more to say in this poem of his, which I strongly suggest you listen to and consider.

In it, he reminds us that to cut ourselves off from vulnerability is to “immobilize the essential.”

No artist wants to do that.

Does All Art Require Vulnerability?

Consider this quote from the great Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“ ‘My jump isn’t high enough, my spins aren’t perfect, I can’t put my leg behind my ear.’ Please don’t do that. Sometimes there is such an obsession with technique that it can kill your best impulse. Remember that communicating with an art form means being vulnerable, being imperfect. And most of the time it’s much more interesting. Believe me.”

How to Greenlight Your Vulnerability

With the help from the quotes above, I think we can agree that while we fear our vulnerability, we need to tap into it to create the art we were born to make. But how?

Let’s start with that idea of imperfection. Wrap your arms around it and consider it.

It’s possible that we learn the best stuff when examining our imperfection.

To do so, think in terms of what I call moving from “here to there.” This is something I talk about extensively in Memoirama, my intro online memoir class. To successfully write memoir, you must cover the territory only from here to there – from when you did not know something, to when you did; from when you could not do something, to when you could; from when you did not have something, until you did; or from when you had to shed something, and you did, and what life looks like now. Here to there. Remember: You are not writing autobiography when you write memoir. You are merely taking on one aspect of your life and showing us, in scenes, your transcendent change from here to there.

Consider a “here to there” of your own. What did you need to learn, not know, need to get or have to quit? When did you know you needed to change, how did you change and what are the results? And here’s a tip: Read those three questions again, answer them, and you have the three acts that portray every piece of memoir.

Your vulnerability will be needed here to admit that you did not know something, could not do something you needed to do, that you lacked something or that you were perhaps addicted to something that you needed to quit. In fact, only vulnerability will reveal the big and small scenes that portray large and small life change. So tap into it.

How to Portray Vulnerability?

Consider any recent transaction you’ve had with someone or something. Specifically, sort for an experience during which you felt something shift inside you. Perhaps you had an encounter with your child, a stranger, your dog, a spouse, in the garden, listening to a song (yes, I co-wrote the lyrics for this one and yes, I sobbed while writing it, but more to the point, I changed outlooks during the work), or with someone at the post office.

What happened there? This is the essential question. Ask yourself, “What just happened?” In what ways do you feel different? Did something you once thought get edited, heightened, demolished or otherwise changed?

Now zero in on where you initially learned the idea, what about it was changed, just how that happened and where that new information might take you.

This is the territory of memoir, where we frequently shift from what we inherited from our family – their politics, religion, biases, culture or belief system – and take on something new, heighten and add to what we already know, or drop that inheritance in favor of something that better suits us.

I would argue that the very best memoir is written within the argument that you can say no to some inheritances. Don’t believe me? Have you ever tried to shed something you learned in your family of origin? It’s hard work – life work – and the very stuff of good memoir.

Simply put, if there is no change, there is no piece of memoir. Why not? Because merely recording what happened is autobiography, and knowing the difference between autobiography and memoir is essential to your success as a memoir writer.

Be Vulnerable When Writing

Go back and reconsider that experience where you felt that shift. Now dial back even further. What did you once think that got reconsidered or remade, and where did you get it?

For us to value that change, you must first show us what you once believed and where you got it, and while we do not need your entire childhood laid out for us, we need specific proof of that familial inheritance.

Maybe you remember being a child and going to vote with your mother, and maybe you remember your shared staunch devotion to some candidate from a party you can no longer support. Look at that arc. It takes us from here to there, and might make a lovely personal essay or scene in a book-length memoir about saying no to some inheritances.

What is the Greatest Obstacle to Vulnerability?

Perfectionism. Period. Trying to get it right with every sentence will curtail your honesty and demolish your curiosity, as well as your success. Here at The Memoir Project, we refer to a first draft as “the vomit draft.” Talk about being vulnerable, right? Few things bring us to our knees like a good vomit.

Simply put, perfectionism makes vulnerability impossible. When we set our sites on perfect, we are so busy trying to look great, sound great and be great that we miss the beauty in the mess.

You’ve got to walk into the mess, writers. Why? Because only then can you appreciate and chronicle how you walked out.

Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir classes Memoirama : Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know. Memoirama 2 . Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book. How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary : Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world. And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the Master Class , the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.

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Reader interactions.

Roja D. Sooben says

October 11, 2023 at 9:49 am

Dear Marion

Thank you so much for this timely wisdom.

Cheryl Lynn Achterberg says

October 11, 2023 at 12:11 pm

The advice “from here to there” was eye opening for me, the best explanation of memoir I have heard. From when I did not know something to when I did… Thank you for giving us your wisdom.

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It is #dahlia division weekend here. When your sister is @awaytogarden, some things are just one “urgent gardening question” away. Not this time. I sent her this photo. She just laughed. Rut roh, as Scoobee Doo has been known to say. Here I go. Can’t be harder than editing, right?

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COMMENTS

Chapt. 9.a Flashcards
Lee is writing an essay on _____vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them. A reactive B stereotypical C impact-oriented D psychological E biological
Anxiety and Related Disorders Flashcards
Lee is writing an essay on _____ vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them. ... _____ vulnerability. specific. Filomena has been seeing a therapist for two weeks. Based on the symptoms, Dr. Sharma believes that Filomena is suffering from ...
PSYCH 2301 Quiz #10 Flashcards
Lee is writing an essay on _____ vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them. ... _____ vulnerability. specific. Filomena has been seeing a therapist for two weeks. Based on the symptoms, Dr. Sharma believes that Filomena is suffering from ...
Vulnerability to Anxiety
Vulnerability to Anxiety. Researchers believe that anybody can experience a bout of debilitating anxiety. But some people seem to be dispositionally inclined to anxiety: Their defense systems ...
Anxiety and Related Disorders Quizz
Lee is writing an essay on _____ vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them. reactive. the symptoms need to have been present for this diagnosis to be appropriate? 6 months 1 year 2 weeks 1 month 2 years 7.
Why Vulnerability is Key in Your Personal Statement
Showing vulnerability in your essay demonstrates your ability to connect to another person on an emotional level, sharing feelings and morals. That is a trait that you can use to make the reader feel more connected to you and invested in being part of your success. This doesn't mean that you have to write about your deepest and darkest ...
5 Practical Tips for Writing with Vulnerability
2. Illustration Courtesy of Author. Since becoming somewhat of an academic in the business realm, I've found it interesting how most people are either afraid or unwilling to expose themselves in ...
PDF leading the call Sharing Our Vulnerabilities as Writers: Writing and
on the journey of writing a piece—an essay, a novel, a poem—an internal journey begins as well, paralleling our own self-transformation. In other words, as our writing transforms, so do we (Alderson, 2011). How many fearful young writers are missing the joy of making something out of nothing, of discovering what they think, what they know
Being Vulnerable in Writing
Here, Brené Brown, distinguishes 'using' vulnerability and 'being' vulnerable; as Jane Harkness says "there is a stark difference". The point for us, the laypeople, is that being vulnerable in and with our writing is about opening a space for dialogue, a space where we can write, think and be together, where we can grow, and, as ...
Vulnerability: Positive and Negative Sides Essay
Introduction. Vulnerability is quite an ambiguous matter since its influence might be positive or negative, depending on an individual's attitude. For example, in a video provided by TedTalks, Brené Brown talks about vulnerability as "the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace ...
Exam #4 Psychology 101 Flashcards
Lee is writing an essay on _____ vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them ... _____ vulnerability. specific. Filomena has been seeing a therapist for two weeks. Based on the symptoms, Dr. Sharma believes that Filomena is suffering from ...
How vulnerable to be in your college essay (and can you talk about
Three: If you, like my student at UNCW, are unwilling to model any vulnerability whatsoever then be earnest or funny. Express love or gratitude. Write about a quirk or funny habit. Practice some self-deprecation by writing in some details that make you seem like a dork. There's an implicit vulnerability in all these options.
Anxiety and Related disorders Flashcards
Lee is writing an essay on _____ vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them. psychological
The contested concept of vulnerability
The concept of vulnerability is widely used in the social sciences as well as. in policy making, health and social care services and in social work, referring to a variety of groups or individuals ...
The Hidden and Invisible: Vulnerability in Writing Center Work by
In a writing center training class or during a writing center staff meeting, ask consultants to take a few minutes to walk around the space of the writing center, taking pictures of objects that leave evidence of consultant or writer vulnerability (perhaps using the photos in this chapter as an example).
Exploring Vulnerability in Writing
And that's the rub of this style of writing. For it to be well-done, it needs that vulnerability. But that vulnerability leaves you raw and exposed. If you're lucky, the reader response calms your nerves. Eventually. As it turned out, my friendship essay was very well received.
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy
The essays thus address fundamental questions concerning our moral duties to each other as individuals and as citizens. This volume contributes significantly to the development of an ethics of vulnerability and opens up promising avenues for future research in feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy, and bioethics.
How Writing is an act of Vulnerability
Writing is an act of vulnerability. There is vulnerability in the writing process even if I don't share my words with anyone else. This is because writing can be therapeutic, and therapy sessions can be painful work. Good writing requires honesty: It is a process where examination of oneself means looking deeply into one's heart, where ...
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy
The three sources include inherent vulnerability (those universal vulnerabilities intrinsic to the human condition), situational vulnerability (those that arise from context), and pathogenic vulnerability (situational vulnerabilities that arise from significant oppression or injustice, or "when a response intended to ameliorate vulnerability ...
S. 10 Quiz
Lee is writing an essay on _____ Blank vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them. biological. ... Lee is writing an essay on _____ Blank vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they ...
Showing Your Working: On Writing Vulnerable
I guess the writing that I do which I experience as most vulnerable is the stuff where I show my workings, rather than just telling the reader that this is something I struggle with too. When I first wrote Rewriting the Rules the main place that I did this was the conflict chapter. I illustrated that with a detailed description of the kind of ...
The Role of Vulnerability in Writing
"Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding under-current of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature."
Anxiety and Related Disorders Quiz MOD 10 Flashcards
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Lee is writing an essay on _____vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders. He will spend his time researching early experiences and how they impact one's view of the world around them., Which of the following is the most accurate statement regarding a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)?, The alarm reaction that triggers ...

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Your chancing factors

Why Vulnerability is Key in Your Personal Statement

What’s Covered:

Why is Showing Vulnerability Important?

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Vulnerability: Positive and Negative Sides Essay

4 The Hidden and Invisible: Vulnerability in Writing Center Work by Lauren Brentnell, Elise Dixon, & Rachel Robinson

It’s often uncomfortable to be vulnerable with others, especially within public spaces.

In Lauren’s research with trauma survivors, she advocates for care-based practices in all areas of our work, including research, teaching, writing program administration, and, of course, writing centers. Care-based practices include:

This leads us to a series of questions:

Lauren’s Story

Elise’s Story

Rachel’s story

At the beginning of this chapter, we asked:

Cathartic Worst-Case Scenario Dump

Crying as Praxis

Capturing Evidence of Everyday Vulnerability

Key Takeaway

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Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy

REWRITING THE RULES

Writing about vulnerable stuff

Showing and telling

When is vulnerable too vulnerable?

What if…people hate it?

What if…people are mean about me?

What if…I change my mind later?

What if…it’s vulnerable for other people I’m writing about?

What if…I get something wrong?

Writing vulnerable

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The Role of Vulnerability in Writing

Why Do We Resist Vulnerability?

What is Vulnerability?

Does All Art Require Vulnerability?

How to Greenlight Your Vulnerability

How to Portray Vulnerability?

Be Vulnerable When Writing

What is the Greatest Obstacle to Vulnerability?

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