vulnerability

You can change the world again, instead of protecting yourself from it.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.

It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.

I never knew I liked to be outside so much. I never knew I liked lochs and views and that, but I could seriously handle living in a cottage by the side of somewhere like this."The Panopticon

One is free, and at the mercy of everything.

It__ very hard to have ideas. It__ very hard to put yourself out there, it__ very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers and the creators. They are the magic people of the world.

They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier.

We stood there for a full half hour, like so many scarecrows, while they jeered at us from a distance, and one or two of us were shot down.

Once people see you cry, it's like they own part of you. It's like you ripped a hole in yourself, and they saw through whatever armor you had on, got a good long view of all the screaming alien goop underneath.

The heart of a woman is the best mirror you can find.

I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.

I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?

It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

We exercise kindness in any moment when we recognize our shared humanity__ith all the hopes, dreams, joys, disappointments, vulnerability, and suffering that implies.

All his life Harry Bosch believed he had a mission. And to carry out that mission he needed to be bulletproof. He needed to build himself and his life so that he was invulnerable, so that nothing and no one could ever get to him. All of that changed on the day he was introduced to the daughter he didn__ know he had. In that moment he knew he was both saved and lost. He would be forever connected to the world in the way only a father knew.- "Nine Dragons" by Michael Connelly

In my work with hundreds of women over the past few years a theme has emerged: women__ desperate, unquenchable desire to step into their power, countered by the fear of what will happen if they do. The longing to express the riches inside them, wrestling with the deep terror of being burned by the judgement, hatred or rejection of strangers or loved ones if they do. This fear of being burned is an oddly female one. It is a fear which keeps us small and scared_ but seemingly safe. From the outside this can seem like an overreaction. Both the need, and the fear. But women, it seems, have an innate knowing of what it means to burn_ and be burned. They know the dangers in their bones. And it makes them wary.

There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.

The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.