Vulnerability

Recently, I was reading a book by Brene Brown about vulnerability. I thought there was no better way to connect with my readers than to be vulnerable with them.

When you’re a writer, you base your stories/characters on what you know. So, naturally, characters come from you, or people you know. Gemi is somewhat like me—she’s a ginger, a thinker, and she cares for people—deeply because she has loved and lost. However, I’ve never been in love with two people at one time, let alone three. I have loved someone, and then lost that love.

Truthfully, I was Gemi’s age (23) the first time I fell in love. Before him, I had kissed two men, and neither of them met anything. They did, but I knew they were not going to go anywhere. Peter, was the first, and was a Greek man in Greece. When I decided to study abroad, I wanted to kiss a Greek man in Greece. Peter was a Greek man in Greece, and he was also my friend. We kissed on his birthday and on mine and a few times in between. Then, there was Ilya, who I kissed during a game of truth-or-dare in which I chose dare. Ilya has since become my best friend, and I love him, but our lives were—are—on different courses. Ilya was the reason I wanted to teach in Dubai last year, but God had other plans. Ilya has helped me through some of the worst times in my life, and I’d like to think I’ve done the same for him. In fact, after the breakup from the man I thought was the love of my life, Ilya held my hand in comfort as we walked through the streets of Chicago on one of our reunion trips. During that trip, he made me laugh, which is what I needed at the time.

Don’t get me wrong, I had dated and broken up with before this particular breakup: the high school boyfriend, the soccer player, and the football player. But this one was different. We had talked about our future together, and he knew things about me that I had never told anyone before. The breakup came out the blue—one night after we had gone out he told me he didn’t want to date me anymore. I was crushed. I slammed the door in his face. I was angry. And he never gave me a reason. After we broke up, most of my pain came from knowing that he knew things about me, and I couldn’t take them back. I knew that he wouldn’t tell anyone what I had told him, but I had opened my heart to him, shared my heart with him, and he crushed it. I didn’t just lose my boyfriend; I lost my best friend, too. It hurt terribly. I held on to that hurt for a long time, and I let it change me. I became closed off and afraid to live life—to let go of him really. Even though I haven’t talked to him in years, I recently deleted his phone number from my contacts. It was liberating.

Still, it was hard for me to write a love story because I had shut myself off from it for so long (even from the people closest to me). But, I am a different woman now then I was when the heartbreak happened. The heartbreak happened. It sucked, but I’ve moved on. It has helped me learn a lot about myself. I am strong, independent, smart….things I knew about myself, but spending time with myself helped remind me of how great of a person I was, and I strengthened those qualities in myself. I love who I have become in the years since I thought my life was never going to be the same. I survived, and I am stronger because of it. I can’t go back, nor would I want to. I have always tried to live life without regrets. I can’t change what people do, or how they handle things. All I can do is look at life positively and not get bogged down by how people handle their lives. All I can do is be me. I can’t shut people out because of the past—they are not responsible for it, and what other people have done to hurt me in the past. Letting people in is risky. It will require me to be vulnerable and open my heart to new experiences and potential hurt. But I can do it. I have faced the hurt before. I have been vulnerable before, and I can do it again. In the words of Dr. Brown, “I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. To be human is to be in vulnerability.” And that’s what life is really about being human. I hope my experiences have made Gemi’s story more vulnerable and relatable–more human to the audience.