I’ve always seen vulnerability as a weakness.

People hurt and get hurt, it’s reality. And pain is not the best feeling for someone who can’t embrace their vulnerability. It’s easily and poorly understood as a form of being a weakness, isn’t it?

When you try to keep yourself and your feelings sturdy and strong all the time, you want to maintain that image so the world won’t see when you break down.. and you don’t want people to see you break down. And that’s where you’ll realize you’ve already built yourself a wall away from people who don’t mind to see you in tears.

When you’re vulnerable, you let people into your heart- the epitome of feelings. And by doing that, you’re allowing yourself to be shot while trusting others that they won’t pull the trigger. Being vulnerable is to give up the strength of keeping things together.

The wall you long built and held strong can destroy you in all ways possible. You leave yourself open to being held hostage of pain, of being attached, of things that you don’t want to feel.

…But aren’t we all hostages of life? Existing itself is vulnerability of every being. We experience all sorts of things from extreme happiness to grief to anger to outright failure. It distorts our perception of goals, our eye for happily ever afters, our happiness, our success and all those in between.

We cry, we drink, we rant. We get confused on what to do next. Everything becomes a taste of how reality can both be an accomplishment and failure. But after a tub of tears, cases of beer, and tired friends rolling their eyes, we realize we need to move on and look forward to what happens next. It may take time, but we eventually do.

The past becomes a lesson.

And through those lessons, we strive for more. We stand up, we try again. We learn from all those and it’s what makes us better.

When you open yourself up to the world, it’s when you also connect yourself to other humans with the same feelings, empathy and sympathy. It makes you weak, but also stronger at the same time.

You’re being more true to yourself instead of hiding. You’re able to express yourself more than being stoic just to look like you’re okay. But it is okay. People laugh at tears. People judge character. But that’s just part of the reality we live in.

It’s when you’re vulnerable that you become strong. You have to embrace that.