vulnerability cannot be escaped.

it's an intrinsic part of the process of making art and sharing it with the world.

Vulnerability sucks.

It’s uncomfortable, it’s tender, it’s awkward. If we grew up in circumstances where it wasn’t safe to be vulnerable (at home, at school, with friends) we probably internalized the idea that vulnerability is a problem. A danger signal, a sign to protect ourselves. Maybe even a threat to our sense of belonging and connection. Definitely at least a feeling to avoid.

We all have a million unique ways of shielding ourselves from vulnerability and guarding against it when it comes up.

But here’s the thing:

If you’re an artist, you’re going to feel it. It’s part of the process.

And I don’t mean just when you’re making your art. It’s a given that our emotions, sensitivities, etc. will get expressed and channeled into the art we make. But that’s the (more) comfortable part. Because when you’re making the work, you’re still alone (or with trusted collaborators) in your own creative bubble.

The REALLY vulnerable part is after you’re done making it and before you’ve shared it with the world.

My partner and I (always) have a bunch of different projects in different stages of development and completion. Some in research/brainstorm/generation, some in various layers of drafts and revisions, some in readings and workshops, some getting put together/put out on the market to be funded for production, some completed and working on distribution, etc.

Each of those stages involves finishing a layer of the work and sharing it with a new audience, whether that’s people in the room for a reading, investors, production companies, film festivals, publishers, distributors, a first-preview audience, or (maybe the toughest one) critics.

About six weeks ago, my husband/creative partner (his name’s Erik, which I should tell you so I don’t have to keep calling him my “husband/creative partner”) got an amazing idea for a screenplay. It was like it came from the art gods. It was hilarious and imaginative and perfect and actually really doable to make with the resources we have. He sat down every day for the last 2 weeks or so and wrote 10 pages a day, with no outline. The whole thing just downloaded and he didn’t think about whether it was “good” or try to fix it or get it right or even evaluate it at all. He just kept moving forward and letting it come out how it wanted to and had amazing boundaries with himself (and me) that kept the inner critic out of the process and kept him out of his head.

Then he got to the end of this vomit draft, which is beautiful, hilarious, and messy (as it should be) and started reviewing it in preparation to turn it over to me to fix the structure, track all the arcs, cut the fat and make it linear. (More on this in future posts, but we’ve been writing together for 24 years, and while we both come up with ideas and we both build architecture for them, his tendency is toward wild flights of imagination and mine is toward structure, and we tend to play our strengths).

This particular idea came out pretty fully formed, we wrote most of the roles for people we know, we’d like to make it fast, and it’s going to have a first reading pretty quickly. So we won’t be spending long in our private creative bubble and it’ll get a first audience soon.

So today he had a vulnerability attack (which he gave me his blessing to write about—thanks, babe).

This script that he LOVED while he was writing it, that he had a total blast with, that came delightfully from the art gods, suddenly became something very worrisome that felt like it might be terrible and unfunny and not-any-good and all the other things we tell ourselves when we have a creative vulnerability attack.

I reminded him of something we’ve been taking turns reminding each other of for the last 24 years: that’s part of the process.

You can’t outrun it, out-achieve it, out-fame it, out-award it, out-professional-experience it. You never graduate from it.

It’s not a feeling you can escape by making the work “good enough” or “perfect” or “great”—because it’s an intrinsic part of being an artist. (More on perfectionism and vulnerability-avoidance in future posts, BTW).

When you make your art (if you’re doing it right) you put it all on the table. You express something that matters to you, and you put effort and care into it. Artmaking (especially any kind of storytelling) is an act of communication; the magic is not only in the making but also in the exchange between artist and audience. The whole point of telling a story is to translate the inside of your imagination into the inside of someone else’s imagination—and we never know in advance if it’ll “work.” If anyone will get it. If the audience will hear what we’re trying to say, or feel what we’re trying to communicate.

We can learn craft—and we can trust that well-crafted story DOES work, reliably, to communicate the inside of our imaginations to the inside of others’ imaginations, because we are designed that way (much more on that in the future too, it’s kinda my main jam).

But we don’t know whether our work is well-crafted until we hear it, watch audiences respond to it, get feedback, etc etc. So even if we’ve built enormous faith in the power of craft, we still never really KNOW—not until we’ve actually shared our work with people—whether they’ll get it.

So the moment before that happens—between the making and the receiving—is ALWAYS vulnerable.

Always!

And that feeling doesn’t mean that something’s wrong. It doesn’t mean that you’re in danger. It doesn’t mean that people are going to judge you or your work and say it’s dumb. It doesn’t mean the work is bad. It’s not an indicator of ANYTHING, except that you haven’t put the work out there yet.

It’s not the case that if the work was “good enough” you wouldn’t feel vulnerable (you can’t out-achieve it, remember? Perfection is not protection).

You are going to feel vulnerable in the moment before you share your work with a new audience, no matter what.

This is (part of) why being an artist is courageous. Lots of people with normal jobs get to avoid these feelings of vulnerability (or experience them only in their close relationships with people they trust, instead of with strangers). Artists—especially storytelling artists—are in the habit of practicing deep communication with total strangers. That’s kind of crazy!

It’s also awesome. And potentially revolutionary. Because it means really connecting with people out there who are different from us, who have totally separate lives, who might think and feel differently about a million things. This world needs us to communicate deeply with people who are different from us, and I think we all need it for our own humanity and evolution, too. In ways that are way deeper, more thoughtful, more real—and more vulnerable—than social media.

That vulnerability can’t be escaped—and it shouldn’t be. It’s part of our job as artists to make friends with it. If making friends with it seems like a big, unrealistic ask. . . then maybe start with just accepting it as inevitable. If you practice responding to it as an inevitable part of the process rather than a big, flashing danger sign that your work sucks, it gets easier to hang out with.

That practice is one of the many reasons why being an artist for a living isn’t just a job, it’s a spiritual (or evolutionary) path. Being an artist for a living forces you to feel and work with a lot of human-being stuff that most of us would rather avoid. It makes you be brave even when you don’t feel brave. It makes you learn to hang out with vulnerability. All in service of a greater purpose.

After I reminded Erik of that, he was like, “oh, right.” And then he went back to work.