I could say I haven’t been blogging because I was hoping to move to the new leapf app before sharing something new, and that would be true, but not the whole truth. You can see in my archive that I’ve posted less often as the years go by. While I could claim that that’s because I started working and not having the time for so much writing and sharing, that’s not the whole truth either.

This talk revealed something to me:

Originally this blog was going to discuss organizing principles, so here I could describe how I suddenly see vulnerability as an organizing principle. Brown calls out the certainty of your pet rigid religious dogma as an effect, but popular libertarianism would seem just as well a denial of vulnerability. To be vulnerable a minute, though, I should care about the personal first.

The chord Brown’s talk strikes is that I write less because I’m afraid of sharing as much as I used to. The stakes have changed, and I feel more vulnerable out here on the internet than I did. It’s tempting to say I wrote so much about so little, so where was the risk, but that isn’t so. The posts where I write about the aftermath of 9/11 from my perspective as an otherwise uninvolved American seem so cavalier that I cringe. Why did I have feelings and opinions about things? Did I not know the risk for criticism I put myself at?

While the things I’m ashamed of probably don’t compare to anyone else’s real truth, I still fear harsh judgment. It seems like a lack of trust, and I suppose it is. Maybe I didn’t care then, some kid at school from nowhere with nothing to risk. Over several years, connecting with new people grew me a new shell. Having to represent other people I cared about through a company I cared about to the outside world gave me something to protect.

Now, I have only my own reputation, such as it is, to trade on. Now, I have to trust it to a society in thrall to troll culture. I don’t trust that I won’t be the target of a relative standard where my heart is deviant but someone equivalent is loved, by some invisible immutable reasoning.

Besides squishy secrets, I’ve spent this whole lost year feeling vulnerable for not having a job. (We call it a livelihood.) I mostly filled the hole with the looser material of contract work, picked up through colleagues, but it doesn’t bind. It’s mostly covered my rent, though it’s the speculative personal projects keeping me busy, so I feel like I’m doing it wrong if it’s supposed to be a way to live. There’s no equity (so to speak) in it. It’s a shifting foundation I can’t depend on for anything.

I don’t mean to think a job is necessary, or the solution. If I invested too socially in my job (building up those connections, unexposed to the real world of mutual skin-in-the-game vulnerability), well, I deserve to be punished for lack of foresight, and to fail into a more diversified situation. Just from this year’s blown opportunities I know for damn sure you don’t cope with that powerlessness by getting a job at someone else’s company – but maybe the best way out is through.

Ultimately I think (or at least hope) that sense of vulnerability is what I was trying to identify writing about the pleasure of being lied to. That memory I describe there is really about the temptation to be open, and that desire and fear and possibility is my emotional definition of vulnerability. If its shape is completely foreign to the structure of my life today, perhaps it’s my life that needs to change.