This piece interrogates vulnerability through the lenses of Brené Brown, Bell Hooks, Goddard College, and The Red Nation, tracing the tensions between mainstream self-help narratives and decolonial, trauma-informed approaches. By weaving personal insight with critical reflection, it models a voice capable of turning rigorous analysis into accessible, compelling writing.

Melding personal insight with rigorous critical reflection, this piece demonstrates a voice that can translate complex theory into compelling, accessible narratives with precision and punch.

Reflection questions on vulnerability

Think about the resources we shared Brené Brown, Bell Hooks, the UGP Epistemology Statement, and the Red Nation video¹. How do these resources fit together? How do you understand their relationship? What do they tell you about yourself?

2,561 words, 14 minutes read time.

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Initial Reactions

It took me some time, some re-readings, and re-watches to fully absorb the dense entirety of the materials, and I found that I had to let it all swirl around my head for a while, and looked further into “rabbit holes” of my own biopolitics and history, what that is, and what it means to me.

I came to Goddard to benefit from the specific methods of epistemology presented, and each resource related to vastly different experiences and points of view: Brené is a white female, white-collar professional who has spent twenty years as a researcher sifting through the dredges of courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy as it relates to accepting responsibility
and healing collectively, leaning towards leadership, while asking her audience to, “be mindful that when we ask people to “take off their armor” we may be asking them to do something that is not emotionally or even physically safe in all environments.” (emphasis added)

Alternately, both Bell Hooks and the Red Nation panel tell a story of difference within an oppressive system, and each source mentions ways some of their specific collective might engage with responsibilities as Natives to address needs within their own systems, in order to enact change throughout. I like this because the appropriate people are taking responsibility for themselves instead of a dominant group controlling a narrative that doesn’t have to do with them.

What first struck me, after reading Bell Hooks’ essay and after hearing Brené, was experiencing again the way those who don’t know, can’t quite seem to know. Like disability or sudden illness, one can only conceive of those spaces fully if they’ve been there if they’ve walked certain alleys
and lanes–and Brené’s version of vulnerability, taken out of context, has probably spiritually killed many who wonder why her ideas no longer work for them in a new situation or may have never worked, not knowing these messages aren’t meant for them in particular, by design.

Mental health appears to be performed and seen so differently across peoples. All three resources mention the necessity of liberation through various ways of healing trauma and how to be vulnerable within their own groups which all feel very appropriate to the UGP Epistemology Statement.

Upon first glance, I can’t help but see the overall presentation with a habitual marketing eye. I see segments and ways information is presented and controlled by so many different sources by design. I imagine there might be ways to break and bend structures and governance both within and without- is so much easier to do with correct, helpful information reaching different people on different levels of understanding, free of shame. I hope for a holistic approach to living, free of destructive binaries that cannot include the many shades of gray in-between; shades of gray necessary to create depth.

Family History Exploration

Going through the material, I cried and was led toward thoughts of where I came from, and even found answers to old questions, having vivid memories of my Aunt and Granny, in hushed voices, telling stories about the world, our family and themselves. I even uncovered a few more old memories during this exercise. As I compared family stories alongside a greater context of what was going on in the world at the time, I found a whole other version of a story, all its own.

After digging into my particular family history, I understand better now the violence, addiction, and silence pervading my family. I understand more from reflections on the material, the in-betweenness and pervasive feeling I have of being an outsider, and even more of why that might have come to be. I still have more I feel I need to uncover about places in the world where
my family found themselves, and what they were doing then.

There’s something like a mineshaft in my mind that feels a lot like what it is I’m doing here. I hope to uncover something good, eventually, at the bottom of it all, placed somewhere in some beginning.

Identities

As a person who feels in-between and outside, full of freedom and walking blind, it’s the first time I am piecing together some cohesive story for myself. I spent a lifetime hanging on to old stories and legends passed down and pieced together from old memories and common cultural references not connected to any other realities.

I suppose my odd in-betweenness and outsider perspective may have given me some fly-like vision with an intense brain, trained on a terrible overabundance of patterns around me.

It’s a lot to sift through.

I feel that I both identify with and am on the outside, necessarily and naturally a social chameleon, in a variety of ways, that often still feel shameful into my middle age. Over time,
however, I’ve learned to understand in present time the fluidity of my personhood. It appears I might be learning again how to engage in community as a participant, and not as a watcher or performer. I am missing some tools in my toolbox in the absence of ones I’ve had to leave
behind for a whole other reality and way of experiencing. I am relearning and strengthening my ability to be a good friend, colleague, and co-worker.

Everything about me, as an individual, feels in the middle and in-passing. In terms of astrology, I am a dead-center “cusper” on the very last day of Aries (April 19th), the day before Taurus. I am in the dead center, no matter from which marketing house, of the micro X-ennial generation.
It has been asked throughout my life- if not demanded of me, to provide answers to questions like, “What are you?” “What’s your race?” and “Where are you from, you know, like, where’d your family come from, cuz, you know, you don’t really look all that white.” and ostensibly my all-time favorite “Are you sure you’re white?” I don’t know. I am exactly what I am and I don’t fit into all these bs categories. How ’bout that? I have to explain that despite my coloring, the US census decided in 1953, timely, that Italians were “white”.

From another angle, I smile wryly remembering a drunk man at a bar admonishing me, for he was utterly certain I was a Spanish girl, lying about my “true” heritage, because I “…looked perfectly and exactly like a Spanish girl”. Then, of course, this is a story I don’t repeat too often because the fact is immediately, strangely up for debate, and so much whiteness is exhausting.

That man, in particular, was “tired of everyone acting like it was shameful to be white.”

It’s so disorienting and sometimes alarming for me to be white in the way that I am white. I’ve been sexualized and exoticized more often than not- especially in the wide variety of social circles I found myself in mostly because I presented to many as female despite my ongoing fluidity. I never felt like I had a purely “white” experience, while certainly, I have directly benefited based often on what region- from white privilege. I am categorized as white in many areas, especially in New Mexico, for instance. Not so much in other places I’ve been like outside Austin, Texas or
Ohio.

On the materials themselves, do I dare say I recognized something of myself in each? I have walked many paths, and I have at times, especially in professional workspaces, benefitted from some of Brené Brown’s glossy philosophies. But as time ticks forward, the meaning of so much and
so many things no longer hold the same meaning for me as they once did. Experience and time changes the color of it all. After the readings, I further considered the way whiteness has driven and changed my history, specifically, and how the plots all begin to sound the same now and throughout time.

Brené Brown’s particular philosophies are designed for a particular crowd and make me think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You may as well overlay a class triangle right on top of that; times in my life I had to survive, and it has been unfortunately numerous, there wouldn’t have been a
shred of truth in Brené’s words that would have applied to me or my situation in such dire moments. I shut down in predictable ways that affect so many others and their families over and over again. Many times I was interacting with the world around me, singularly focused on not descending so far I could never get out. It was necessary.

On Vulnerability

What do I share? How much is too much? Not enough? Will some read between the lines as intended? This is the hard stuff and I have been both humbled and put down for perceived shortcomings and it’s been the general way of the world for so long- I am hungry to find solutions for long-term peace. I can’t let go of that thing. What happens within our inner worlds might be mirror reflections of everything around us, all of the time, infinitely, this being a perspective I’ve had once everything had fallen apart and echoed and bounced around in the funhouse mirrors of my own brain.

I was struck at once by the hot unfairness I felt creeping up my own neck as I read Hooks’ account of being a small child and protesting real injustices she encountered then. It felt so familiar, and in real-time whilst reading the passage. I was a Catholic “schoolgirl” at age four, a must for my ultra-traditional family, and I’ve only just begun to understand what precipitated
violence told in hushed whispers by women in my family who suffered so much at the hands of husbands, lovers, and their own. Dare I tell, in writing, of the injustice that seared within me as I
kneeled on rice, forced to think deeply over what I had done to transgress?

There I was, standing again in the corner, shamed fully for not knowing the numbers in front of the entire kindergarten class.

Another time, wailing in a corner, desperately crying out numbers 1-100 in order, and failing miserably, as I was simply expected to know. This was how I and so many others must have first learned to perform. Generations of people.

I always had to know. It was dire.

Columbus Day

Columbus Day was mentioned in the materials and is also a weird, disorienting thing for me. My childhood was split between time with my dad’s southern Sicilian side for the first bit, and my mom’s religiously estranged, fundamentalist-Christian/protestant, clearly and proudly white
northern-nes for the rest. I grew up fairly confused about the day- racist and conservative-republican as my mother was, she taught me about the “truth” of Columbus Day (with some gaping misconceptions) and I understood then that not only did Columbus not discover America and never did, the day only celebrated the slaughter of first nations people. It was today since I learned that Columbus Day followed an Italian slaughter of 19 in Louisiana, after protests from the Italian government. My mother would sometimes boast that we were “1/16th Native American” on her side, unironically a super “white” thing to do. I’ll be interested one day to finally settle out the details. Natives were a-okay with her.

A weird thing, considering the Native realities reflected in the book panel and all around us. Acceptance of their fates as unfair, but seen also somehow as inevitable and necessary.

Later, as an early adult, when visiting my father’s side of the family, everyone was surprised and likewise offended that I hadn’t been steeped by my mother in the culture of New York’s Columbus Day and Columbus Day Parade. Other Italian families I’ve visited have echoed similar sentiments. Funny enough, if I hadn’t heard “stay away from Italian men” so many times
throughout life by mostly Italian women, my queer, fluid, pansexual self may have never dared dive straight in. If anyone had been able to be a little more honest or open about the truth, I might have run the other way.

My dark-skinned, Sicilian (“we” just say Italian!) father, to the sure chagrin of the rest of his family, had a deep love affair with Native culture that he proudly embodied with a large, turquoise and silver ring he left to me before he died. I wore it around my neck for many years with a chain I made from black, red, and white thread I wove intuitively with what I was certain then were the “correct” colors for this. His swagger still lives in me.

My family on both sides come from opposite places of the most extreme right. It’s so strange. They’re so legitimately dark-skinned and quite olive-complected, adding to my astonishment.

Since his death, everyone I’d encountered on his side had only rude, hateful things to say about anyone unlike them which, from my view, incredibly did not include “white people”. I wonder what my dad might have thought about what I’m so grateful to be unboxing now. His darkness and violence may have led, in ways, straight to his death. I’m glad, in ways, no one can take
away my image of his pride, the rebel I imagine him to be, the man who famously wrapped a Corvette around a tree and walked away from it. In love with being in love, maybe. Cognitive dissonance does in fact run deep, I thought, as I was completing the assignment. I was told my
whole life how lucky I am to be a Caserta.

Hope

There was this one time I paid a woman I knew professionally quite a lot of money to inform me, at the start of Covid, that I had a large amount of “ancestral work” to do, and that this was the biggest thing holding me back in life. Lights, in actuality, flashed on and off around me and I felt
the steep sharpness of wishing this toxicity to be healed. It’s been such a perfect time to practice the means to not only process the hell out of something but instead let so much go in honor of the seasons and iterations of myself that have since passed.

I am hoping endlessly for the right people to reach out to one another in these times, at the places where their paths cross. Do I pray? I am in no way Christian yet daily, deeply I hope, with all my might, for the good guys to win it for the people, at least for a while. I hope.

I think it’s high time for another golden age, after so much hurt and darkness, as the age of AI and information take off.

I believe in power to the people.

Final Thoughts
Most of us are in some way simultaneously recipients of some sort of privilege and at various
rates of disadvantage. It’s our responsibility to check ourselves for ways living in a toxic system
affects our ability to live peaceably amongst ourselves.

These readings fit, for me, as a person who has climbed up and down the ladders of privilege
and safety; dizzying heights and dangerous lows.

I hope, with all my might, it is, in actuality, darkest before dawn. Messiest before it’s somewhat
clean, somehow better, less violent.

I am so hungry, aching for the right side of good.
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1. This is where I’ll provide the texts I’m talking about ↩︎