I ride by this several times a week, on a road I like to call Eye Flushing Ave. or sometimes Crying Avenue depending on how honest I am being.
Lessons From 2013 #9: Being Vulnerable is Cool.
I’m writing this list because I have found that if and when I find a way to share the depth of my experiences, and not just things that are simple, positive, flashy, flirty, lighthearted etc., it matters. So early on needs to be a send-up of vulnerability; a special way of both understanding your own self and connecting with others. It takes being real honest, courageous and shameless. That’s fucking radical. It takes knowing myself and believing that others want to know me, too; that my experience matters. It takes my specifics of stories and uses them so others can draw their own parallels. It makes for better art.
Also: it’s really hard to ask for help without being vulnerable, and everyone needs to ask for help sometimes. And, it’s pretty hard to build intimacies without being vulnerable.
I’m not saying facebook is the right place for vulnerability even though it’s one medium I’ve chosen. The NSA, and — perhaps scarier — data-mining algorithms as developed by corporate marketing department, matrix the digital sharing of our lives against an accumulation of privacy concerns.
But there’s, also you know, in-person conversations, letter-writing, blogging, zine-making, novels, tweeting, email, performance…. however you do it, telling someone else that you’re a human with a range of human experiences, in a culture that aims to reduce our giant breadth of experience to vaguely pleasure-driven consumption, is a small act of resistance.
Lessons from 2013 is a mini-series dedicated to all the ways folks make it through in general, and to my personal resilience gathered from a bad year. See the series here: http://www.damienluxe.com/category/top-10-lists/
