Being vulnerable, our nation’s anti-pastime, will not always be an immediate celebration of the generosity of the human spirit, should you undertake that brave task, which you should. Not everyone is a Rad-xotic Fantasir, so it can also backfire, and it can backfire hard. Many people will hurl a violent silence back at you, or, worse, ridicule you about something that was excruciatingly difficult to force out of yourself in the first place. A month or so ago, I had a friend who saw my self-concealment as a personal affront. This person’s constant refrain: “I want you to trust me! You can tell me anything. I just want to listen to you. I just want to be there for you.” I should have heeded the empirical evidence to the contrary in front of my dunce face: If this person was so into the idea that I would fork over the grand truth of my innermost feelings, why were they only saying what THEY wanted out of that, instead of asking me questions about it, or trying to make me feel at home enough to spit ’em out? Why was I surprised when, after I finally stammered out a shrapnel of a malignant secret that’s been lodged somewhere in my lower intestine for over a decade, their eyes went cool? They said, “Wow. Uh, you know, you should really talk to someone.” I had thought that was exactly what I was doing! I thought I was being mad mature and EMOTIONALLY AWARE and, like, using I statements and that! They clarified: They meant that I should talk to a therapist, and they were saying it to make me feel like I was wrong or bad for feeling as I did. SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TALK, BUD!

I am learning to employ what I think of as “selective vulnerability,” which sounds counterintuitive, but is actually a good means of self-protection. This means, wield your vulnerable feelings with respect and consideration for the specific person or people to whom you’re speaking. Ask yourself, “What am I looking to accomplish by telling the person in question this thing? Am I in good hands with them?”

As far as the first answer goes, if it sounds something like, “Because I want them to feel sorry for me,” “Because I want them to do me a favor that I don’t feel is fair to ask for, and I think telling a story about Just How Doggone Bad I’ve Had It will coax them into giving me this thing out of pity,” or, “I want them to make me feel like a good person and validate me about something I’ve done wrong,” you are in EXCELLENT SHAPE. Just kidding—none of that stuff sounds particularly like the work of a caring friend. It sounds like untempered manipulation, and you should take an L on trying to “use” feelings for some insidious other endgame, because it’s skeevy. Do not exploit your own vulnerability to take advantage of people, my tender triceratopses. That’s part of what gives it such a lousy stigma. If you actually-factually just want to be heard by someone else, regardless of what they can then give you, go ahead and spit it all on out.

When it comes to WHO can handle the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: You are allowed to be what you’re like in every single moment, and it’s up to others how they choose to deal with that. If you’re very brave, you will sail forth regardless of their opinion. If, like me, you’d rather start a little slower because you’re green as hell at this: Understand that vulnerability can make people uncomfortable if you’re doing it in a maudlin or un-self-aware way, or if you’re constantly redirecting conversations to point straight at yourself and your problems, or if you’ve simply misjudged your audience. Here’s how to tell if someone will be receptive to your confidences: Like Eddie, do you respect and enjoy them in all kinds of ways without their having had to insist that they are a GOOD AND WORTHY PERSON to you? Would you feel comfortable asking them about their own lives? Better yet, have they offered up details of that autobiography to you unbidden? Tell ’em what’s on your mind. You don’t have to have experiences in common in order to care about or be understanding to one another. You just have to usher in the possibility of manifold truths, instead of just your own, or just the one you think you see around you most frequently.

It was badly dispiriting to finally try and extricate a part of the jagged flotsam in me with a person I thought would handle it with care but instead made it pathological. That encounter handily demonstrates how not to go about courting, and incubating, a person’s fledgling attempts to be honest about their feelings. Don’t IMMEDIATELY try to help, tell them they’re wrong, or otherwise fix or administer to their “problem.” Just listen to them and love them empathetically, and ask questions if it seems like they’re faltering in telling you on their own.

I can’t allow the miscalculations I made in the past to impede on the goodness and closeness that can also come from presenting the truth of your heart. As a veteran posturer, I can tell you that if someone manhandles or maligns that, that’s their failing, not yours. You’ve still done something incredibly kind by demonstrating that someone they know is capable of revealing themselves, even if they’re afraid. That will stay with them, as it has with me each time it happens. They’ll know it’s a possible alternative option to, “LEMME JUST NEVER OPEN MY TRAP ABOUT THINGS THAT IT MIGHT BE CATHARTIC TO GRANT FREEDOM FROM IT.” Maybe somewhere down the line, they’ll remember when you did that and try it themselves.

If you don’t feel safe being vulnerable with others, even selectively—if there’s no one around to whom you can spill, as I suspected there wasn’t for me as a teenager, but will never know for sure because I didn’t try—at least be vulnerable with yourself. Find some way of squaring off with your feelings and employ it whenever you can, even if it’s just in thinking through them critically yourself, or writing about them in a diary (although maybe don’t leave it on your desk unattended if your classmates are mercenary, shitheel jackals). I would rather be, like, Morrissey, Jr. trying not to cry all alone in the cafeteria than a stunted, surly fuckbag who’s convinced that outwardly caring about anything is a crime punishable by knuckle sandwiches.

The earlier we at least TRY to buck the hardened, cynical ways of relating that le monde seems so dogged in imposing on us, the better chance we have at dispelling them, and of being thoughtful, self-aware, and UNDERSTANDING people—getting close to them and trying to see things as they see them in REAL ways—in that same monde. Which, I think, is the preferable way to spend your time on/in it. God, see how wimpy that sounds? My teenage self wants to introduce my simpering face to some toilet water via the gnarliest swirly ever committed! It’s true, though, so 2 BAD, even if it means I’m a loser and an off-putting, effete heart animal instead of a cool, physically aggressive ruffian or ruthless multi-billionaire/politician making my scrilla/policy on the backs of other people’s pain. I’m the sucker getting too worked up over getting chosen last for badminton, even though that’s exactly why people are choosing her last in the first place. I’m an acoustic guitar getting sand kicked in its face by a hot babe at the beach! WANNA READ THIS SONNET I WROTE REAL QUICK? I honestly think that’s a more valiant and courageous goal, personhood-wise, than trading in the codes of fuck-you-I’m-the-king power imposed on us thus far. Find your own new way to win. Bring others up with you if you can, but at the very least, don’t trample them.

All right. I need to stuff my heart back in my mouth. Is sincerity a terminal condition? I feel that it might be, based on the life-threatening degree of embarrassment I’m redolent with righ nah, having barfed out so much of my interior here today. I’m not going to balk at my own feelings now. (It’s chill—just don’t use this to hurt me later.) It’s too late anyhow, as they’re all here in writing: I just read my own diary to the fifth-grade classroom. I find that if you’re the one inviolately coughing up your heart by choice, no one has the chance to wrench it out of you against your will. There’s no going back, and that’s good (albeit terrifying!!). It demonstrates that you care for and respect your people by entrusting them to do the same with you—why else would you open yourself to the possibility of being wounded? The world needs you to talk, not only because hearing you will aid in its expansion, but so your neighbors on it, in turn, can talk to YOU and inflate it still further.

Because this isn’t solely about self-actualization! It’s about good citizenship, if you’ll permit my using a grandmotherly term here. Honestly owning up to what and who you are is a kind and responsible act, the positive results of which bloom first in yourself. Allowing people in—setting out a welcome mat reading, “YOU’RE ALLOWED TO STOP PRETENDING YOU’RE A ROBOT IN AN APPROPRIATE AND TASTEFUL POWER SUIT; I WOULD LOVE TO BE A HUMAN STETHOSCOPE LISTENING TO THE WEIRD SONATA COMING OUT OF THE HEART YOU ARE TRYING TO MUFFLE,” and mucking up those brandished by others—is crucial to mental health and wellbeing, and plus, it just makes you feel more inclined to snug the hell out of people and feel like you’re part of one big UNITED FRONT that is the HUMAN RACE ENTIRE—which you are, like it or not.

Since we’re all running that same sludge-marathon of being alive near one another (The Human Race for the Cure of Thinking Feelings Are a Degenerative Disease?), I propose we should, in fact, try to like it, which means trying to like one another. I mean, it’s clearly going great for exactly NO ONE that we can’t seem to understand or empathize with one another’s experiences or identities at all! It hasn’t resulted in people killing one another in the streets, or claiming that it’s not a big deal or made up when someone who isn’t exactly “like them” is hurt or abused, or manifested a political structure that lifts up whoever can be most vicious and diabolical and is contemptuous and disenfranchising of those with less privilege and greater need? When we play it “cool” (because all that stuff is downright fucking tubular), we reinforce that the act of wanting to truly, humanely understand and/or relate to people is unseemly or weak, which is dangerous. It’s enfeebling on a personal level, but violence-inducing on a cultural one.

When we become real people to one another, we become less susceptible to hurting and policing one another, both figuratively and in the very literal and pragmatic senses of poking holes in the lie of a dominant and univocal mode of living as the “right” one. Vulnerability is not a wound, but a cure. ♦