“How does that make you feel?” was a question I long avoided.
For Caribbean men, being asked to express our emotions can feel like an insult. Our guard stays up, and we deflect and suppress open dialogue. We walk around with chips on our shoulders, stacking them up into walls. Enclosed we remain trapped in our ways.
Last summer marked the end of a two year journey with a therapist who challenged my one-word answers when she asked how I felt. “Fine” wouldn’t cut it. After our work together ended, I reflected on my notes from our sessions. “It’s hard to say what I want to say,” I wrote in an early journal entry. I remember how reading that aloud to her felt physically demanding, as if I was swallowing the chips I’d been carrying around.
“Of course! Vulnerability takes time,” my therapist had said, then thanked me for sharing.
Vulnerability? The word confused me. Why choose to become weak? But I noticed that sharing just that little helped me feel lighter, “as if I’d dropped some armor,” I’d journaled afterwards.
I didn’t know it then, but that was the first crack in my wall.
The severed limb problem
Sometime later, as I continued to contemplate the v-word, a coworker sent me a link to a viral video. “Man gets hand chopped off in Dominican machete fight” the horrific title read. I recognized the gas station where it had been filmed, I passed it everyday on my way to college. I clicked the link and regrettably, I watched the video.
I had expected the gore, but what got me the most was what came after. The man picked up his hand from the sidewalk, then strutted away, chest out and shoulders raised as if to say “you should see the other guy!” In a later video he’s seen at the hospital with his stub patched up, dancing for a Tik Tok reel. I couldn't sleep right for days.
How wide is the gap between pain and healing when you can’t even acknowledge you’re hurt?
It got me thinking of less extreme examples around me; male relatives hiding illness until too late, best friends never reciprocating an “I love you, man,” and my own tendency to wall off emotions; all of us strutting.
I brought up the video, and my early observations to my therapist.
“How does talking about your emotions make you feel?” she asked on cue.
“Cursi,” I told her, the Dominican word for corny, for soft.
It was my version of the severed limb.
Overplaying
Around the same time I started therapy I also began lessons for jazz guitar. I wanted to learn to improvise; to spontaneously express emotions through my instrument. It’s a challenge I’d avoided since high school, when I bombed during a music recital. I quit lessons after that and joined bands more focused on precision, working in isolation until I perfected my parts.
I became an expert at being well rehearsed to avoid feeling exposed.
One day my instructor stopped me mid-solo, “You’re overplaying. It's a conversation, slow down to give the listener time to have a response.” I record every lesson and recently, as I rewatched the video from that day I heard a deeper message within his feedback:
When we share too much too soon we sabotage connection. We become more verbose than vulnerable.
Overplaying, I thought, is like oversharing. It’s when we disclose in disproportion to the level of trust in a relationship and expect intimacy in return. This expectation is perhaps more common today, when there are endless apps promising to connect us at the speed of digital light. But those connections are weak, they tend to drop.
Glass
All throughout the time I spent with my therapist, I worked hard at opening up and I felt my relationships deepen. I started to see vulnerability as a strength, yet one to handle with caution. Like glass, it can be both a window and a mirror.
As a window, vulnerability lets light shine both ways. We open it up, to allow others to see inside us, and for us to see inside them. In this exchange, we can point the finger, not to condemn, but to relate, as if to say "Oh! You too!"
As a mirror, vulnerability helps us acknowledge that there are smudges on the surface; ways in which we blur the parts of our reflection we’d rather not see. Recognizing what we’ve hidden from ourselves allows us to wipe away those smudges until our full image appears.
This by far has been the biggest reward for me. Once the mirror was clear, I started treating the person looking back with more kindness, and a healthier relationship with myself began to appear.
Risky business
Now, six months removed from therapy, asking myself that dreaded question has become a regular practice.
Being vulnerable is a scary investment. There's risk involved; of being wrong and being wronged, of embarrassment, of coming off as cursi. These fears will always be there, but it’s only by risking shattered glass that our bonds become stronger.
In our last session together, I told my therapist how embracing vulnerability had transformed my life, and thanked her for working with me. “You did all the work,” she said. “I just held up a mirror.”
“What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” - Seneca. 62 AD.