On Weakness

Recently, I’ve been experiencing my shortcomings in visceral ways. I choose this sentence in place of something like “I’ve realized my shortcomings” because I want to emphasize two words. Those words are “experiencing” and “visceral.” In this post, I’d like to elaborate on why those two words have caused me to see weakness in a new light.

First is “experiencing.” It’s not difficult to “know” what weakness means. All character driven stories use it for plot and character development. We’ve seen and judged someone else’s weaknesses before. We’ve all felt weak ourselves, and how we interact with this experience is often a defining element in developing our self-esteem and identity.

In all of this, it’s tempting to take weakness as a concept and simplify it. Perhaps it just becomes a hurdle to overcome, or even something intellectual and abstract.

But as I experience my own weaknesses more, I feel that one simply can’t describe it in such a manner. One cannot define its meaning neatly. One cannot lift it to the abstract world like he/she can with love and death. With such concepts, it’s at least possible to understand a little bit of its essence with artistic mediums or perhaps through hearing personal stories. But doing this to weakness not only fails to capture its meaning, but often misrepresents it. Understanding weakness on any level must be personal.

The true meaning of weakness lies in those times where the mind comprehends its own faults and yet cannot seem to avoid them. We catch a glimpse when we not only read about the tragedies in history, but somehow feel their weight and the impact in our own lives and the world around us. It begins to show itself when personal effort and conviction fail.  The list could go on eternally, because one experience can capture many different meanings of this word “weakness” depending on the person.

And in all of these experiences, the word that immediately came to my mind to describe them is “visceral.” It is all instinctual, illogical, often ugly and even crude. I don’t think there’s a sure way to tell when we are starting to know weakness, but if I had to hazard a guess, it’s when we behave viscerally. Everything that we have formed around us falls away and we are left with something so strange and animalistic that it’s impossible to convey it in words.

After this cloud passes, only then can we begin to understand what “weakness” is. The tone of this post has been rather grim. I apologize if I have misrepresented weakness as I inevitably would as I write about it. In reality, I think that the key element of any wise person is that they have had this visceral experience. Such a person begins to understand weakness and I would speculate humanity itself. This understanding is powerful. It has so much potential for helping others. But it also has unlimited potential for exploitation.