Vulnerability Is My Superpower

Later today, I’ll be co-facilitating a Writing Workshop for the Great Dames community, an organization that I care deeply about, where I serve on the Board and proudly show up as an ally. As a pre-workshop assignment, we sent out three prompts and encouraged attendees to bring reflections or a short piece inspired by one of them.

Rather than simply introducing the exercise, I decided to try it myself.

Here’s the prompt I chose:

The Day I Took My Power Back: Write about a moment when you drew a boundary, made a bold decision, or walked away from something that no longer served you. What changed when you stopped asking for permission?

And here’s what emerged.

There are so many ways we learn to shape ourselves—quietly, unconsciously, and often long before we understand what we’re doing.
This piece isn’t a confession or a conclusion.
It’s a remembering.
A slow unwinding.
A return.

Vulnerability Is My Superpower

I used to believe
one had to be easy to love.

Quiet,
unassuming.
Never seeking too much.
Grateful for whatever was given.

Learning early
to soften my edges,
unconsciously reading the rooms,
I shaped and reshaped myself accordingly.

Becoming someone
easier to be with.
Someone easier to love.

Becoming adept
at holding everything in.
It took a lifetime
to learn how to let anything go.

Then came the quiet undoing—
not all at once.
More slowly deflating
than collapsing.
More steadily unraveling
than dissolving.

Sands shifting
beneath my feet,
revealing
the myriad shapes
I’d shifted into.

In seeking safe harbor,
those intuited as safe
wore no armor
and carried no weapons—
concealed or otherwise.

Not rushing to prove or explain.
Their questions flowed, unfiltered,
while making space for mine.

Vulnerability—
not a curse,
but a quiet blessing.

Not a weakness
to be denied,
but a strength
worth learning to lean on,
learning to live within.

Truth’s essence
speaking through presence.

Here I am.

Not polished.
Not hardened.
But tender, open.

Not certain.
Still becoming.

And maybe,
in a world that teaches
love is earned
by reconfiguring ourselves,

the most radical thing
we can do
is

embody who we are.