By Hanat Oladele.

When I received the WhatsApp message containing this topic from the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Al-Faaedah Press Organization, my thoughts could not cross the river of the lesson that was flowing into my mind, they had to swim in it but the usual – doubt and anxiousness – crept in. “I can’t write that”, I said. 

Some lessons make you brutally honest with yourself and in relation to the cliche “the truth is bitter”, the lesson I learnt transformed the bitterness of its truth into tears for me. Writing about it would be like filling my pen, not with ink but with tears and scribbling away, exposing my imperfection. But here it is written and being read, so what changed my mind? At first, I only read the first two lines of the five-lined message but when I read till the end, I read: 

The topic is more of a personal reflection that you want your readers to know about or it can be fictional.

A personal reflection is like walking down a path you had once walked with the aim of noticing things that were unnoticed at first, the bright and the gloomy. I would have to write about the gloomy sides, the teary ones, and that is me being vulnerable with my emotions and I am not supposed to because of the “tough life, tough you” mantra but I decided to go on with the article because that is exactly what the lesson I learnt recently taught me and the lesson goes thus:  Vulnerability is not a weakness, it is a strength. 

We all possess this opinion – hide your weakness, show your strength – made by ety. Society goes further in defining what our weaknesses and strengths are. They say emotions are your weaknesses, and being logical is what makes you strong; and logic and emotions are like day and night which cannot coexist, so you must let one go, the weak one. 

Have you ever heard of Twilight? A time between day and night which appears like a mixture of both. A mixture not equal, not perfect but existing. And we are capable of modelling that mixture, we are humans. 

Remember that you are created by someone whom no mind can fully comprehend His knowledge. He is capable of making both logic and emotions coexist like twilight in our bodies. We are not robots, nor are we puppets, we are humans. We can feel, we can love, we can cry, we can think critically, we can solve problems, we can make decisions, we can do it all. 

Then why do we think we have to kill one to make the other survive? We keep forgetting that each has its season. There are times we should cry and times we should smile, times we should rest and times we should work, times we should be emotional and times we should be logical. There are times for everything. 

As a writer, I wrote about everything else but my struggles. I  wrote about starting without motivation but not the doubt halfway. I wrote about my finished project but not the failed ones and how they made me weep at night. I wrote about my strength but not the disappointment of being unable to apply it. And when I thought of doing so? The thoughts: “No, they would think I am not good enough or I am being picky would emerge. 

But what if I am not there yet, still learning, still unlearning and still growing? Or what if it is more than me? What if it is about replacing loneliness with companionship, when I write about my lonely days and someone feeling lonely reads it and it makes him better. Oh, writing is therapeutic, reading is as well. 

Do you know the power of “I am not alone, there has been or someone is feeling what I am feeling”? Do you?

Why didn’t I go for fiction? Maybe going for it meant avoiding exposing myself or maybe I thought it would be lifeless. I would erase my emotions and replace them with “that was when I knew the power of the equal sign during my math test. It is capable of changing a positive sign to a negative one, if the former crosses over it” (haha). Or how I learnt that resilience is key but the outcomes would still be the same. They would be me erasing how I cried upon knowing that concealing my emotions was making my writing lifeless and when I do not write what truly matters to me and I try to be perfect, it makes writing less beautiful, less loving and less amazing to me. 

The strength: 

The strength lies in sharing your unspoken struggles which in turn leads to stronger relationships. When you tell a friend or your siblings about you being unable to comprehend your courses or the doubt whether a path is for you, they pray for you, advise you and sometimes cry and laugh with you over it because they also feel the same. All of these moments, prayers, advice, tears and laughter, compound into tighter bonds for both of you. 

The strength exists in the release of the bottled-up feelings affecting your mental health, and this makes you care for the better. This can save you from slipping into depression and anxiety because you would be given attention by people who truly care and value you. If not given attention, your boundaries would be respected more and you would be able to breathe again in the space vulnerability has created.

The strength sits quietly in the laughter we share about your sapa days with your roommate and later randomly, he/she thinks of your needs when he/she is in money. 

The strength is seen in how more approachable you become to people when you expose yourself and they begin to see you for the human you are – the one with flaws, the one who gets scared sometimes, and someone that if they confide in would not make them seem less. 

We are humans, we cannot forget that and vulnerability makes us more human, we have to embrace that. Ever since I have incorporated vulnerability into my writing, my approach to writing has changed. I actually feel happy and it actually calms my heart when it is heavy. I have also been able to connect with people who have been filling my life with happiness. 

I have stopped worrying about being perfect as long as I show up. As long as I can breathe, dream, think, cry, smile and laugh. As long as I can be human. And all of these can be traced to the fact that “vulnerability is not a weakness, it is a strength”. 

So dear reader, be vulnerable.