The transformation of vulnerability into power and action

I stopped being afraid once I came out of the closet.

I didn’t stop being afraid the first time that I said, out loud, repeating the words of Audre Lorde: “I am a black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?” No, the end of fear was a long process, not an instant.

And I didn’t stop having moments of fear or panic. Those come, sometimes with great force, and often early in the morning, in the darkness, in the silence.

What I mean, though, is that once I was willing to step out of the closet and be completely vulnerable – to expose myself knowing that I could very well become (even more) an object of hate and of violence from people who looked like me and from those who didn’t– once I allowed myself to be that raw, I became absolutely and devastatingly powerful.

For make no mistake about it, that kind of vulnerability announces, in no uncertain terms: no matter what you say or do to me, I will not back down. I will not cower. I will not be silent. I will not hate you –but hear me clearly: I mean to be free.

This is yet another terrible, frightening moment in our nation – in the world, really, where children are bombed and washed up on distant shores and shot in neighborhood parks and told that they will be chased out of their homes and across borders into countries that do not know them.

We live in dangerous times, where men and women in power feel no allegiance to their neighbors — men and women who peddle fear and hopelessness in nihilistic pursuit of profit. Men and women who are not in their right mind, really, because they would rather destroy everything — all of us — than share anything.

To their insanity we are – no question about it – completely vulnerable.

But it would be a terrible mistake to construe that vulnerability as helplessness and weakness instead of as our power and strength.

That rawness you feel? That’s your spirit calling you to stand tall and be free, because something in you knows already that to those who would oppress us, nothing is more frightening and dangerous than a woman (or a man) who has much to lose and yet steps out anyway in the midst of madness to insist on her rights, to claim her freedom, to protect her brothers and sisters, to love as a radical answer to hate, and thus to convey that, come what may, she shall not be moved. Not one inch.

Be dangerously vulnerable.