The Paradox of Vulnerability

Courtney E. Martin: Hi. How are you?

Frank Ostaseski: I don’t know.

Courtney E. Martin: I think we can all relate to that. So tell us what happened with you.

Frank Ostaseski: Oh, just hanging out in hospitals.

One Saturday morning in July, I woke up next to my beautiful wife, and I had this splitting headache. I got up and thought it was something, so I went to the bathroom. In my medicine cabinet were a couple of Oxys, which everybody in America has, and they didn’t touch the pain.

The pain persisted. I’ve said it was like having a welding torch cut across my skull. My dear bride, Vanda, understood to take me to the emergency room. That’s when I learned I had had a very severe stroke.

What was interesting, though, is that even in the midst of the pain, there was some kind of background awareness that was there as a steady support.

With this awareness, I could watch my brain go offline. I could watch my ability to tell the difference between night and day go offline, my ability to find directions or find words go offline.

Anyway, I was hospitalized, and then I had, I think, four more strokes in the next month. So I was back and forth to the hospital quite a lot.

I’ve been learning a lot.

Courtney E. Martin: One of the things we talked about that I really want to hear you speak to is whether there’s anything you used to say about sitting with other people’s suffering that you’ve now decided is bullshit, based on what you’ve experienced.

Frank Ostaseski: Well, I tried not to bullshit people too much even then.

One thing was, “We can take away all your pain.” It took them five days to get my pain under control. I was in gut-wrenching pain for five days.

The other thing is this phrase, “It’s no big deal.”

I remember once taking care of a guy with AIDS. He reached for something on his bedside table and knocked his glass of milk onto the floor. I said, “It’s no big deal. We can clean it up.”

And he screamed at me, “It is a goddamn big deal.”

Every experience like that touches one’s vulnerability, reminds us of our limitations and causes us to see the fragility of our lives.

It’s a big deal.

Courtney E. Martin: Can you say more about vulnerability? I think that’s a word, particularly in our culture right now, that we throw around a lot. What has that actually come to mean for you through this experience?

Frank Ostaseski: I agree, it’s thrown around a lot. It’s used all the time, but it’s not very well defined.

Dictionaries define it as the susceptibility to being harmed physically, emotionally or psychologically. Brené Brown, who has popularized the word vulnerability, speaks about it as uncertainty and the risk of emotional exposure.

I think there’s wisdom in both of those things, but I have a different experience of it.

For me, vulnerability is not to be equated with weakness. When we equate it with weakness, what happens is that we develop a kind of defensiveness. Then people confuse that defense with vulnerability.

Vulnerability itself, for me at least, is open. It feels porous.

I just saw Lucy, and she reminded us of our high school biology. The only thing I remember from it is this teaching on osmosis, how molecules move across semipermeable membranes effortlessly.

Vulnerability is more like that. It’s more like permeability. It opens us.

For me, it’s one of the most beautiful human qualities because it allows the beauty and the horror of the world to impress themselves upon our hearts, our psyches and our souls.

For me, vulnerability is openness.

When people say that they’re scared of being vulnerable, I think it’s actually just the opposite. They’re so defended and so guarded that they’re afraid their defenses won’t protect them.

In healthcare, we do it all the time. We build some armoring around our hearts.

Here’s what happens with that: When we cut ourselves off from our fear, our grief or these other things, we also cut ourselves off from our capacity to love, to be compassionate and empathetic, and to know that we belong.

I don’t think we can be free if we cut off any part of ourselves.

Vulnerability, to me, is inviting it all in. Everything. All of it.

The fact that some people are going to make love and other people will make war. That there are children being shot in our schools and others who are speaking truth to power. That there are kids like my granddaughter making tents out of couch pillows and bedsheets, and there are babies crying in refugee camps in Syria.

We can let all of that in. We have to let ourselves feel all of that.

I think this is the truth of vulnerability. It’s connective.

Courtney E. Martin: How does one survive letting all of that in, though? I think that’s the fear. What you just articulated is enough to make me want to lie in a dark room for a long time.

Frank Ostaseski: It’s not such a bad idea to do that. I’ve been doing a lot of that.

If we think that all we are is this personality or this brain, you know, awareness can hold all of this. I’m not trying to be New Agey. It’s true.

Awareness can hold all of this. It doesn’t need to push anything away.

One of my greatest gratitudes is that, for 50 years, I’ve practiced loving awareness. That discriminating wisdom could watch my brain go offline. It could help my brain to heal. It could give me the capacity to withstand, tolerate and forbear what you’re describing.

One of the ways I do it, Courtney, is that I lie in bed at night and think, “I’m alone, and I’m scared.” Then I reflect on all the people who are lying in bed at night alone and in pain.

While you might think it would sadden me, in fact, it’s this great source of strength for me. My own compassion emerges and gives me the capacity to be with the suffering of our world.

Going toward that suffering gives rise to compassion.

Courtney E. Martin: We’ve been talking a lot today about stories and putting language to things. I notice in myself that there’s a version of vulnerability I practice that is actually very well crafted.

It’s like, “I’m going to tell you a hard thing that happened to me, and I have a really good way of telling you why it’s so meaningful and redemptive.”

But there’s a version of vulnerability, which I think is what you’re speaking to, this true vulnerability, where I don’t have a story yet. I’m in the middle. I’m inarticulate. I’m confused. I’m pissed.

It’s the messy, truly unformed, unperformative version of, “Here I am.”

I don’t want to confuse what we’re saying about story. Story can actually be antivulnerable in its own way if it’s too pretty, too constructed and too well put together.

Frank Ostaseski: Yes.

Sitting here right now, I don’t know if I’ll remember your question or if I’ll be able to find the words to give you an answer. That’s a certain level of vulnerability.

But that’s the surface. That’s just the surface.

The real vulnerability is being human.

It may sound corny, but the great possibility, the great gift in illness, for the person who is sick and for his or her caregivers, is that it pulls them into the deeper dimensions of what it means to be human.

It causes us to deal with the paradoxes of this crazy human condition of ours. We can embody fragility and strength in one moment. We can know absolute desperation and loneliness and also feel ourselves in the family of all suffering beings.

We can feel ourselves to be beyond love and also know ourselves as nothing but love.

Love isn’t just an emotion. It’s a support.

When I came home from the hospital the first time, the home health people came. We live on a houseboat, so they were freaked out.

“How are you going to get across that gangplank? What about walking down those stairs?”

One of the things that has happened with my stroke is that I’ve lost half my vision. I can see you if I look at you, but if I look here, I can’t see you. I can only see a very narrow field in front of me.

The nature of my stroke also causes a lack of impulse control, which I was actually very happy about, but they were very worried about.

They said, “You have to be careful on the stairs.” Everybody was worried about my tumbling.

The next morning, I stood at the top of the stairs, and I had to go down. Suddenly, I dropped into this kind of relaxed awareness. At the bottom of the stairs, I saw an image of my son, whom I love so much.

I knew I had to be careful because if I fell down those stairs, it would really harm him. I didn’t want to do that, so I made a vow to be really careful.

I can tell you, Courtney, that love was just as stable as the handrail. I could lean into it, and it protected me. It supported me.

Courtney E. Martin: What has felt most loving to you since this happened? What kind of care and witnessing?

Frank Ostaseski: My dear bride, Vanda, has been unbelievable in her care. Some people have been following it on CaringBridge. She’s also a very good writer.

When she can just be with me, you know, we wake up in the morning...

At Thanksgiving, we walked around the house saying thank you to everything. Stuff we don’t think about, like turning on the tap and water comes out.

I remember being in India years ago, and the village kids used to come to my hotel. They were fascinated by the toilet and its capacity to flush.

So we said thank you to the toilet. Everything, because everything felt like it was freely given.

Right now, it feels like everything is given.

This feels like a kind of love. It’s not just care coming from friends or family. The whole world is giving to us all the time.

This is a great invitation to appreciate.

Courtney E. Martin: Do you think about what’s next these days, or are you in such a present state that you don’t even need to project?

Frank Ostaseski: In the initial few months after the stroke, I was resting in what I would call a nonconceptual awareness. No thoughts. No anxiety. None.

Now my brain is starting to recover. With that recovery comes perception. With perception comes identity. With identity comes anxiety.

Sometimes I’m nostalgic for those early days.

The doctors and clinicians I work with keep speaking to me about recovery and the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity. I’ve actually found myself not so interested in that.

I’m much more interested in discovery.

What can I discover? This is now my new reality. What can I discover here?

I have this feeling that if I stay true to this path of integrity and love that we’ve been talking about here, I might not recover, but I will be amazed at what I discover along the way.

That’s what’s now and what’s next.

Maybe, once in a while, I’ll try to share what all of this is teaching me with other people, like this, because it’s the way I serve the world.

Courtney E. Martin: Frank, thank you for serving us today. Your presence here is a gift