Saturday, August 17, 2013
Vulnerable Angelina
A couple of months ago, on my way from the
States to Europe, I opened a New York Times and found an editorial by Angelina
Jolie. In it she revealed that she had just undergone surgery for a
precautionary double mastectomy, and that she was going public about it since
this kind of operation has so much stigma attached to it. I was gobsmacked.
Actors and actresses probably need a certain degree of exhibitionism in order
to perform in their profession, but this really floored me: speaking about such
an intimate health detail, and by a woman whom most men (I know many of my
female friends disagree) consider a highly attractive woman. The more I thought
about it, the more impressed I was by Angelina, though I struggled to put into
words, why.
You might, or might not, be familiar with TED talks, a
highly popular site with all kinds of video conferences, most of them no longer
than 18 minutes. I browse it pretty regularly, since the presentations on such
diverse topics as education, marine biology and theatre always fascinate me. So
a week or so after said NYT editorial I bump into a talk by Brene Brown on “The
Power of Vulnerability”. Brown is a social scientist and has researched shame,
guilt and similar emotions. In her presentation she makes a very simply point:
being vulnerable is hard, but very powerful. When you don’t pretend, make
believe or wear a mask, but rather admit that you struggle, doubt and fear,
something happens to your environment. People are disarmed, admit that they too
are struggling, and a deep bond is established. As soon as I listened to that
presentation, I knew what struck me about Angelina Jolie’s admission: it was
profoundly vulnerable, even for the best-paid actress in Hollywood.
Thankfully most of us don’t have to go undergo such precautionary
operations because of family history, at least not every week; and most of us
will never be asked to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times or to speak
at TED. But I believe there is a lesson to be learned. Many of us have grown
wary of revealing our inner selves, out of fear of getting hurt. We’d rather
display a cynical, hardened persona than to admit to our challenges; yet this
very behaviour causes us to feel unconnected, isolated, misunderstood. In fact,
many of us have given up feeling idealistic or excited, for the very reason
that we could be disappointed. So we, and those around us, live in a cynical,
somewhat sad environment. In her book “Daring Greatly”, Brown comments at
length on a famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt- here is an excerpt:
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 worthy 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, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
neither know victory nor defeat.
I know many people who criticize Angelina Jolie for being so
“out there” about her operation; similarly we can be critical of public
officials for their stance on various issues, or of friends who seem so naïve
to pursue certain ideals. But all of them are daring greatly, rather than to
sit in an armchair and criticize. May we find something we believe in and make
ourselves vulnerable as we pursue it; our friends will thank us for it.
