Full disclosure: I totally picked up the term "vulnerability hangover" from Brene Brown.
Exactly 5.3 blocks from my apartment, there's a skinny stretch, one mile and one half long, of beautifully gentrified railway. A park, my favorite, too busy to visit in the middle of the day or on the weekends. Instead I'm forced to visit at the opening hour, 7AM, which also usually happens to be the first hour of daylight in the city.
Here, just before people begin stirring, the city takes a collective sigh in between crusty eyes and soles hitting the bedroom floor.
People often ask me what this place is - where seventy-five percent of my photos are from.
Up here, on The High Line, just two stories above the city streets, life looks different.
Starting at 34th Street, The High Line was a 1930's railroad built to make deliveries more efficient to St. John's Park Terminal in Manhattan's largest industrial district, where it ends. With transportation changing rapidly in the 1900's, the railway was soon abandoned. But thanks to CSX and some smart people with a lot of money, The High Line has now been revitalized into an escape within one of the world's busiest cities.
It's a winding path that zigs, but never zags, between modern condo buildings and old abandoned warehouses-turned-art galleries. Every now and then ducking is required beneath all the greenery planted and grown around.
It's up here, between bushes and bricks, that I've been able to see more clearly during this somewhat morning ritual of mine.
Runners fly past, and I can tell. Some of them are running towards something - they have this vision in their eyes, hopes for something up ahead. Others, I can tell, are running from something. From the person they are, or were. I guess that's really how we all ended up here. One or the other.
We wanted to be better versions of ourselves, and somewhere down near our belly buttons, there was this gut feeling that said, GO. Or maybe it was gas. Either way, we're here running in this amazingly beautiful city, surrounded by wonderful new friends. Trying new things even when it's quite uncomfortable.
Earlier this week, I sent my first essay submission to the New York Times.
[Gulp.]
The moment my cursor clicked send, and the message, "Your email has been sent" appeared, I nearly vomited. I probably would have if I had been able to eat at all leading up to hitting send. You know what I mean. You know what it is to a have a dream, even if it seems quite crazy to say it out loud. But deep down, whether you're great or really quite terrible, you know you must give it a try. Why not.
That was me. I'm trying. And in the very moment that it began, the vulnerability hangover also set in.
The one when we ask ourselves: Why in the heck did I just share such a piece of trash work with the rest of the world?
It's the lump in the back of your throat that said YOU MUST DO THIS.
Followed by: WHY DID YOU DO THIS.
I mean surely the editor will read my submission, think it is the most hilariously pitiful piece of grotesque garbage and then he will forward it throughout the interwebs in early 2000s chain-mail fashion with a call-to-action of forwarding it to ten writer friends before midnight or risk having to read my god-awful essay another time.
And pretty soon every writer and editor and person with eyeballs on the face of the planet will know me as the Rebecca Black of books.
Except that no one really knows me at all.
I have this story living inside my head that I've been dying to write. But each time I sit down to write it, it comes out like this: BLAHABLAHBLAHBLAHDEEBLAHDEE-DOODOO.
It's killing me. I could write all weekend on the most boring things, but when I'm ready to write this beautifully (debatable) plotted story, a giant hawk sweeps down and picks up my pretty little hamster and eats its head for dinner. And somehow I have forgotten how to form sentences except for ones that end in doo doo.
This is a vulnerability hangover. It tells you that you cannot. It starts to remind you of everyone you've ever looked up to, and then it says that you'll never be like them. It tells you your biggest fears of rejection. Which somehow always turn into not being loved.
What you should know is this: Everyone feels this way when chasing a dream. Everyone feels like they aren't good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, talented enough.
Enough with enough.
There is absolutely no reason that you can't. Yes, it takes a lot of work. A lot, a lot of work. But keep doing what you want. Keep showing it to other people. Keep pushing through even when it feels like crap. Sometimes you just have to get through the crap, to get to the good stuff. Don't put your pencil down. We need you.
Eventually the hangover will pass, and you'll be able to write and submit again. And each time the fear is a little less.
I'll leave you with a few more words that were recently brought to my attention by Brene Brown. (If you can't tell, I really love her. Buy her book: Daring Greatly. You won't regret it.)
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,
because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worth cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly..." -Theodore Roosevelt