A claimant of strength without an admission of vulnerability is delusional!

One of the lessons I learned from my grandmother (and which my daughter actually seconded) is that it is okay to show that you are vulnerable.

I have come to value that advice now more than before. You see, you cannot claim to honestly know yourself without pulling open the curtains to expose the vulnerable part of your heart. For many years that was precisely what I shied away from doing. How could I show vulnerability when an adult I once trusted had used my innocence and vulnerability against me? NEVER AGAIN, I swore. I was now an adult, too wise and, hopefully, too self-aware to make that kind of mistake twice.

A claimant of strength without an admission of vulnerability is delusional!

I was to learn that admission of strength without an allowance of vulnerability is delusional. An adage from my tribe above says it all, a child who wants to run before he has learned to walk will most definitely be covered in scars. For many years, I was that child. It is unimaginable for anyone to endure what I did and then go off and lived life as if nothing untoward had happened. But that was exactly what I tried to do. Besides my grandmother and mother, I never spoke to anyone about what happened in Lagos. Even with them, I’d shared my experiences in a piecemeal fashion — an anecdote here and there. The many ‘coincidental’ situations that brought about my opening up were, I came to recognize, strategically engineered by these two amazing women.

To cover up my unwillingness to lay myself bare, I become incredibly talkative. I laughed louder, played harder and ‘recruited’ friends here, there, and everywhere — I call it ‘recruited’ because even with my tinted lenses on, I knew that some of my so-called friends were anything but. Anyway, despite my show of strength, I was deeply broken inside. The event in BUT HE CALLS ME BLESSED! had worsened the already bad situation from my uncle’s home. But no one had any inkling of this — not even my mother and grandmother, because I never told them. The only people who knew and that I could have called on did not want to talk about it. Only my pillows and the four walls of my bedroom were aware of the extent of my pain. I used to say that if walls could tell stories, mine would narrate thousands.

Despite refusing to expose my own hurt, I opened up my heart to those who hurt, to those who needed to talk — or to feel ‘heard’ or validated.’ I opened my heart. And allowed them to pour their hurts into me. I let them find some semblance of healing on my shoulder as they wept out their pain, even as I fought to contain and suppress mine. Hand-in-hand with that, I also opened up my purse. I’d never had a problem with being a giver, and my father had instilled in my siblings and me the importance of sharing. He used to say that a person without the generosity of spirit is the most impoverished soul on earth even if he owns the world.’ He had generously passed that mindset onto all his children.

Real strength is not brawn strength; it’s in what is felt rather than what is seen!

Sensing when someone was hurting and in need came easy to me and still does. Who else can understand an abused person better than one who has herself been abused? But while I offered all kinds of help to anyone in need, it never occurred to me to seek help for myself. Instead, whenever anyone asked how I was, I would smile and said ‘I am fine.’

But I was not ‘fine.’ Admitting that I wasn’t felt, somehow, as though I would never again be fine. I wanted, desperately needed, to be ‘fine.’