“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.â âIan McEwan
While most of you know me to be a playful, pun-filled roller coaster of a writer, Iâd like to set aside my sarcasm and quips for a moment and talk to you about something I feel is an important issue: the role of vulnerability in our society.
Behind my need to vocalize concern is my recent visit to the Vancouver Fringe Festival where I had the opportunity to see the Human Body Project. For those of you unfamiliar with the Project, it was started by Tasha Diamant eight years ago as âa vehicle for change.â As a mother of two, Diamant saw the trajectory the world is on and decided that unless thereâs a shift away from selfishness towards compassion, the future doesnât look so bright. Diamant begins each Project session naked and spends the next hour leading the audience in an unscripted forum. Part performance art, part improvised group discussion, the idea of vulnerability takes centre stage as Diamant does her best to provide people with an environment where raw emotions can run rampant.
While my first encounter with the Human Body Project came two years ago in Victoria, my second experience was still positively jarring. Like finding a love note in your lunch box from your mom, the Project serves as a reminder to me: a reminder of how vulnerable we really are. Near the end of the Fringe session, a man whoâd been silent the whole time raised his hand. He started with how he didnât want to seem confrontational, but he saw Diamantâs nudity as her way of holding power over the audience, despite her claims that she was projecting vulnerability. He compared the experience to whenever he played team sports and how embarrassed he felt whenever he let his teammates downâwhich somehow led to him revealing that yesterday had marked the one-year anniversary of his wifeâs death.
The man went from confrontational to crying in under two minutes.
It was impossible not to sympathize with him, though he was a complete stranger to most of us. His seemingly sudden breakage sent my consciousness rippling back to that time in Victoria, where I found myself unexplainably crying from hearing the stories of other peopleâs pain. Itâs an impossible feeling to describe, but thatâs the Human Body Project for you.
What Iâm trying to say here is that there needs to be a shift from what vulnerability means in our society. At what point did the words âvulnerableâ and âweakâ become synonymous, when they in fact mean the opposite? Weâre all vulnerable in our own ways, but thereâs no hierarchy to their significance.
While not directly, many of the articles youâll find in the issue youâre holding deal with the varying manifestations of vulnerability and how people manage them. The mass exodus of studentsâ unions from the Canadian Federation of Students comes as a result of feeling like students donât have a voice in the organization; Sophie Isbister looks at the comparisons between being an introvert and extrovert and how theyâve become a dichotomy instead of symbiotic; and Angela Espinoza tackles the FROSH rape incident that recently shook UBC. Each story takes a look at vulnerability, but theyâre also examples of empowerment and about taking back that sense of security.
On a related note, this issue also marks the end of Espinozaâs tenure as Arts Editor for the Other Press. Iâve had the honour of working with Espinoza for the past three years and though weâll undoubtedly stay in touch via our weekend antics, I admit that I already miss her name from the masthead. Shine on, you crazy Espinoza. Shine on.
So it goes,
Jacey Gibb
Editor-in-chief
