Image credit: Yu-Gi-Oh!
If you’ve read my posts here, or spent any length of time on my personal blog (which I really, really need to resume writing on) the following statement will likely make you squint at your screen in confusion.
I’m not a hundred percent comfortable with the idea of vulnerability.
Yes, I say that having… deep breath
- …wrote a post memorializing one of my mentors…
- …chronicled my first week on antidepressants and detailed the emotional breakdown that made me need them in the first place…
- …let you into my headspace as I was having a crisis of faith…
- …written an open letter trying to deradicalize members of a rape forum, in the process revealing there have been times where I’ve danced on the knife’s edge of inceldom…
- …and I’ve been transparent about having never been in a relationship…
…but I have limits. Which is to say: I’m not Elizabeth Gilbert.
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. This year, she published another memoir, All the Way to the River. The first time I read an article about it, I had to double-check the URL to make sure I wasn’t on some kind of offshoot website of The Onion. I will likely never read this book, for lack of interest and for ethical reasons I will soon make clear, but here’s the synopsis I’ve pieced together through various articles and reviews.
After publishing Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert divorced her husband and shacked up with her best friend, fellow writer Rayya Elias. Either shortly before or in the early days of their relationship, Rayya was diagnosed with cancer. They moved somewhere isolated, where Gilbert, thinking their time was short, enabled Rayya, a recovering addict, to have a full-on binge: alcohol, drugs, the like. The doctors told them Rayya’s cancer would kill her in six months, but she didn’t die until two years after she was diagnosed. When Rayya stayed above ground long past when she should have been seeing God, Gilbert (she said it, not me) thought about ways to murder Rayya. She didn’t, or else her name would be in the news again for more Michael Peterson-y reasons, but still. Rare is the book that feels like an author is wearing a wire trying to incriminate themselves to a listening FBI agent, but from the sound of it, Gilbert managed to do it.
She’s not the first, either. Lena Dunham, who is so incapable of keeping things to herself that someone made a Twitter account generating fake headlines about Lena Dunham walking back her words, had to make a real apology when she revealed in her memoir Not That Kind of Girl that as a kid, she had fondled her younger sibling’s genitals and offered them treats for a kiss on the lips. Following Joe Biden’s election, a host of former Trump administration members published tell-all memoirs that can be summed up like so: “I knew from day one Trump was incompetent, but I’m denouncing him now, in this book I got paid a million up front to write, after staying in lockstep during the Mueller Report, the Access Hollywood tape, the Stormy Daniels scandal, both impeachments, and millions of people dying because he didn’t take COVID seriously. I’m a good person!” And don’t get me started on the hellscape of livestreamed murders, potentially deadly pranks on the homeless, and overcommitment to YouTube’s old motto “Broadcast Yourself” that is modern Internet culture.
This is a long-winded way of saying: I’m OK being vulnerable. I am not OK being memoir vulnerable. There are things—thoughts, opinions, events only I was there to witness—that will stay between me and God. Things that Kali, Brooke and other members of my inner circle need not know. They’re not necessarily bad things, but they make me think, if I told other people this, that’s not me being vulnerable. That’s me unlearning what “inside thoughts” are. Most people have things about themselves like that, or they should.
I could end it here, but I can’t make a post about vulnerability and not mention the gender angle.
There’s a reason my two specific examples of people who overshare to possibly criminal degrees are women. Men, by and large, don’t do vulnerability. But we also do. Let me explain.
As a Reddit user, and one who frequents r/AskReddit and r/AskMen, there’s a piece of rhetoric I’ve seen over and over: men aren’t vulnerable with the women in their life because some (keyword some) of the women they have opened up to subsequently used their vulnerabilities against them. That’s all anecdotal: after all, people really do that, go on the Internet and tell lies. However, in the TED Talk that made her a household name, Dr. Brené Brown tells about a man at one of her speeches and what he said to convince her to include men in her research on shame:
“When [men] reach out and [are] vulnerable, we get the s— beat out of us. And don’t tell me it’s from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else.”
At the same time, in online conversations, through conversations with women, and (unfortunately) based on my personal experiences, I’ve learned that many women have been men’s unpaid therapists. Laboring under toxic masculinity, men aren’t vulnerable with one another, meaning that when their bottled-up emotions inevitably erupt, women are often the recipients of their trauma dumps.
Conclusion.
Being vulnerable, overall, is a good thing. We weren’t meant to suffer through all our problems alone. That I have people in my life I feel like I can tell almost anything to make my life infinitely better.
Keyword: almost.
Male, female, nonbinary, if you don’t have people you can bare your soul to, I hope that changes soon. Finding your people is a fantastic feeling. But, whatever your social standing, do remember that there are such things as “inside thoughts” and “info not everyone needs to know.”
And for God’s sake, if you’re going to push your partner off the wagon and then think about murdering them, maybe don’t include that in your memoir that will be read by hundreds of thousands of people?
Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.
