Heart Reading … Day 23

Wearing our hearts on our sleeves — a lesson in vulnerability

Vulnerability is hard. I wrote in my recent book, Beyond Karen: emerging from the depths of an epic epithet, that vulnerability is my superpower. I am not afraid to be vulnerable, but it takes one to know one. And without resonant vulnerability, the conviction to stay the course of open heartedness, or wearing one’s heart out in the open “on the sleeve” wears thin quickly.

I am in the middle of four books (in order to ease the discomfort of space in my life) and in one, the protagonist is really cantankerous. Has being emotionally unavailable become attractive? Has it always been?

Intrigue is something; magnetic on both poles — both drawing in and pushing away. The desire to explore someone’s vulnerability, emotionality that you can see (or read about) but the other hasn’t expressed directly, draws us in, tempts us with the sense that we might be needed and able to help.

This is the challenge I am posing to myself. Do we emotionally adept people cause harm by “rescuing” others less adept — by handicapping their own ability or urgency to more directly feel into their experiences?

The idiom of wearing one’s heart on their sleeve, according to the grammarist:

The origin of the phrase to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve is generally attributed to a jousting custom popular during the Middle Ages. Knights traditionally wore colors or some type of insignia on their arms to signify the ladies for whom they were participating in the jousting tournament.

And then again … are those who purport their emotional unavailability, those who are guarded and armored against the forces in the world, drawing in the attentions and implicit rescuing of the other — and thereby causing harm of a different order?