Malibu Beach
A post on vulnerability
Meet Me at Sunset, when the colors of the sky reflect a prism of hope, when the sea is calm, and you can count on the rhythmic clash of the waves. The safe, grounding space. That is the intention for this newsletter.
I have drafts written here that I’ll never share, because they feel too vulnerable. The safe space in which I created to share, feels too exposed. I want to hide behind another name, and I want to share it the same so that you don’t know it’s me. I won’t, though. Just because it’s vulnerable, and the truth is, you likely won’t even care. Or it won’t feel that revealing to you. Maybe it’ll resonate and you’ll move on with the rest of your day. Or maybe you won’t, and you’ll never think of it again. There’s something I find so powerful when people reveal pieces of themselves, the ones we were taught to hide and protect. We were taught to make shells of ourselves, or build thick skin, but instead we were made to feel soft, to be vulnerable. “Don’t let the world make you hard,” I remember Pinterest quotes saying. But how do you stay soft in a place like this?
I remember I stayed at a house on the water in Malibu for a week back in September 2020 with some friends. As beautiful as the house was, I had trouble staying asleep because the roar of the waves would wake me up. I was thankful to be in the bedroom furthest from the ocean and closest to PCH because if the ocean were to take the house away into the middle of the ocean. I already had a plan. I’d just jump out of the second-story window onto my car parked on PCH. Yes, maybe I’d have some broken bones, but I’d be alive. Survival of the fittest. I would never admit that to anybody because they’d think I was completely psycho.
This January, the friend whose birthday we were celebrating in Malibu mentioned how after that trip, she realized she never EVER wanted to own a house on the water, or even stay in one again. I said I had the same epiphany where I wouldn’t want to own a house on the water either. She’d said, “I was up all night, just waiting for the whole house to be pulled into the middle of the ocean.” She was completely serious. So a full five years after that experience was the first time we talked about it, and she had the SAME exact feelings about it as I did. I couldn’t even articulate my elation of her having revealed that, the only words that came out were my millennial lingo, “Wait, no way, me too!” My mind was just whirling, thinking she’s one of the most fearless people I know when it comes to travel and experiences, and she felt the same way I did?!
How much of this is just human experience that we think we’re going through alone, but in fact, if we just connected more, we’d see that our feelings are universal. And still it’s so scary to be vulnerable. It had been 5 years, and we’ve never talked about how every night we went to bed in that house, we’d think we might end up in the middle of the ocean. Now I wonder if the rest of the group felt the same, but I never asked them.
How do you stay soft in a place like this? By being yourself, by being authentic, by being true to who you are, and what you feel.
Because maybe your softness is the very thing that makes someone exhale and say, “And here I thought I was the only one.”
To keep this site alive, please consider supporting my writing: by purchasing my 30 day Gratitude Book, Life Changing Daily Invocations, my book of prayers in paperback, or the Kindle Version.