While reviewing my notes ahead of preparing the original post, a sentence I scribbled down from Maggie Nelson's On Freedom caught my eye - a lack of reciprocal vulnerability often threatens to undermine certain forms of discussion or advancement. It seems like an unusually wise point, though perhaps this may be lost on those who naturally understand the idea.
I'm remembering as I write this how I would often encounter examples of this thought in action through my hospice volunteering - nurses and staff, fellow volunteers, even certain visitors or residents would find ways to establish connection through reciprocal vulnerability. One advantage of the hospice setting to this idea is that a hospice is an environment defined by vulnerability. The need to take initiative, at least in the sense of emotional exposure, rarely seemed to fall to me. It also helped that with others often going first I could sense just how much exposure was appropriate to support or even advance the interaction - too little, like Nelson writes, and I would undermine the moment. However, it's worth noting that too much could create its own problem. One thing I learned over the years is that initiating didn't always mean a willingness to reciprocate, and my misreading of those signals sometimes led to a retreat whenever I my own vulnerability pushed the other a step beyond their comfort level with reciprocation.
All of this applies outside hospice situations, but being outside that specific environment means a lot of interactions happen with an unstated assumption that vulnerability remains in a quiet corner of the interaction. Therefore, my challenge these days is correctly reading situations to determine just how much I can share without making the other feeling that they would be better off retreating rather than reciprocating. It's not my intent to make this sound like a challenge that I have mastered, or that I am some sort of guru in all matters of difficult discussions. It's really more the opposite - I remain such a beginner that my small successes remain limited to areas where I've had the steps spelled out for me.
But shouldn't we share our successes? There was a moment a few months ago where, as a panelist leading a job interview, I sensed our candidate having a hard time answering certain questions. These questions were, by design, unusual in the context of a recruiting process, with the idea being that they would help us better understand our candidates in the context of our DEI goals. I recalled from my prep work how the candidate's cover letter shared their interest in the organization, telling a story that I could relate to from my own experience, so in a quiet moment I shared a couple of comments explaining why I initially wanted to join the team. It wasn't a magic moment by any means, but it did seem like the answers from that point were a little freer, our candidate perhaps benefiting from access to a wider range of available answers due to a sense that their inherent vulnerabilities would be reciprocated by an interviewer.
