“Following the curve of the mountains while driving along the coast, the road dappled with shadowy patterns, and the way it sprinkled our first shower of autumn leaves… Or sitting on a swing with the wind blowing slightly and the Pacific Ocean over the small dunes in front of me… Or lying in bed with Gwennie, holding hands, and seeing a small smile on her face while her eyes close, feeling the same contentment in my own smile. It’s good to feel these moments of magic again.”
My therapist nods and suggests that maybe what I call magic is what it feels like to be unmasked. She quickly acknowledges my connection to nature and something greater and returns to the idea of being fully myself.
She isn’t wrong. In those moments, I’m not thinking of myself in the ways that exhaust me most of the time. I’m not wondering how I’m being perceived or what others might need. I’m not playing one of my well-worn roles (the charmer, the comedian, the listener, the good spouse, the smart worker, the smart ass…). I simply am present and…I search for the word…”unarmored.”
Not only unmasked but vulnerable and open and full of love swirled with a hint of melancholy and sorrow. I am fully alive, all of me.
~
I pause on “unarmored,” uncertain if it is a word. My brain wants to say “disarmored,” like “disarmed,” but that isn’t right.
Unarmed is without weapons. Vulnerable. Like walking into conflict, arms outspread. The place of “Let’s find another way. Together.”
Disarmed is to have one’s weapons taken away or incapacitated in some manner—forced vulnerability. Rather than a sense of openness, it is a place of fear. The place of “What the fuck happens next?” and “Please, don’t hurt me.”
So to be “unarmored” is to choose to be vulnerable. To be open to the world. To find another way.
~
“Vulnerable” comes from the Latin vulnus, “wound.” Vulnerare is “to wound.” And vulnerabilis is the ability to be wounded.
In his book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong writes: “To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
To be seen is to become vulnerable, capable of being wounded.
This, too, is what it means to unmask, to step out of the roles and scripts and empty rituals of interactions. To become real. To be seen. To do so knowing you are walking into the unknown, arms open, seeking and trusting that there is another way.
~
An addendum: The weather in Eugene is in the liminality of the first week of Autumn—highs in the 60s one day and then 88 the next. I check the weather before heading out and either grab my favorite flannel – or not. I feel safe in my flannel; it’s soft between my fingers as I rub the edges while I’m in meetings, in therapy, in lines. I am armored in a super comfy Pacific Northwest sort of way.
Armor can be comforting, can be helpful, can be essential. Check the weather and know what you’re going into before making the choice. Unarmored is always a choice, an option, not a mandate.
—
[Image by AI]