It’s not my first choice. Nor is it my second. Nor is it my fourteenth. I would prefer you not know my innermost thoughts. But it’s not because I’m afraid of sharing my innermost self.

It’s because I’m afraid of being infantilized and collected.

After I had been sober for about a year or two, I stopped counting my curses and started counting my blessings. It’s so contrived, but it really is a little mind hack to refocus attention on what’s going right in my life. For 33 years or so, I had been so concerned about what wasn’t in my life that I didn’t see what—and who—was in it. But what it did was get me out of deficit/scarcity-based thinking.

Recovery made me unwilling to see the bad in the world.

In Lakota, the word wakunza is roughly translated as “inviting” or “wishing.” My mom would always shout it at me after I would sit myself down in a wheelchair at the IHS hospital waiting room. She’d charge over, grab me and dust me off, as if the touch of a wheelchair was enough to disable me. “DON’T BE WISHING OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE IN ONE OF THOSE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!”

In modern English, the TikTok hippies would say, “MANIFESTING!”

In either case, I grew up understanding the power of understanding who, and what, I’m surrounding yourself myself with. And while me just saying how I’m genuinely feeling is unlikely to start an avalanche of misfortune, it gives me pause, especially when well-intentioned people offer a sympathy, “Aww!” That sound is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I’m not seeking sympathy—I’ll let you know when I am—I’m just telling you how I’m feeling. Sympathetic utterances put me on edge and makes me want to dust myself off like my mother used in that IHS waiting room.

But the growth aspect for being vulnerable is also understanding how practicing vulnerability is racialized and gendered.

How many times has a colleague poured their heart out and willingly received sympathy. How many times has a colleague poured their heart out and only received advice, analysis, or blame? And how often have those colleagues been People of Color? How many of those colleagues have been women? How many of those colleagues been queer folks?

When I get vulnerable, it’s because I have no other recourse and nothing I say is getting through to anyone else. It’s a surreal experience because when I’m sharing my deepest, rawest emotions, I still have to edit myself.

My default emotions are fear and anger. And they both show up in terrifying ways when I let them out. It’s too much for the white folks to handle. I have to effuse laughter, joy, joviality, or avuncularity in order to stop the existential panic from the white folk.

But more than that, being shushed away is no way for anyone’s genuine feelings to be dismissed.

Shortly after my mother died, I would go to my recovery meetings and one person in particular, whose own mother had passed just a year or so before my own, would put his hand on my shoulder, give me an earnest look and say, “But how are, really?” By the fourth time he did, I started telling him about how terrible I felt waking up every morning realizing that I was a 32 year-old orphan.

Then he proceeded to say, “Well you shouldn’t feel like that because … “

And I don’t remember what else he said because the blood left my ears and went to my heart as I clenched my fists and my jaw.

How. Fucking. Dare. You.

As I said, my default emotions are fear and anger. When I’m not afraid, I’m angry.

Unfortunately, for professionals of color in the nonprofit space and in movement space, we really can’t go much farther until we get vulnerable with others. White supremacy culture teaches so many of us—too many, in fact—how “professionalism” is supposed to be performed in our spaces. The casualty is often our relationships.

Thus, while vulnerability isn’t my first, second, nor fourteenth choice, it is one I have to make on a semi-regular basis to remind people I’m in community with that I am, in fact, human and fully capable to expressing a full range of emotion.

My frustration, though, has been that even when I have been vulnerable, I felt obligated to do a full presentation on why it was OK for me to have feelings and why it was OK for others to have feelings too.

And then, I remembered my recovery training: someone will hear the message when they need to hear it.