One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from of improvisation is the value of vulnerability.

I have always identified as a strong, fearless, and independent woman. I take charge and make things happen, and I love this about myself! Unfortunately, this attitude has sometimes made it hard for me to let people help me when I’ve needed it. At times, this has kept me from enjoying meaningful connections with others that could have made my life so much richer and easier.  By embracing the principles of improv, and practicing them on and off stage, I have gained the ability to share my own vulnerability with others without diminishing my strength.

The willingness to be vulnerable is so important because only when we let others see our fears do we give them the opportunity to connect with us on a deeper level.  As a way of inviting you to be vulnerable with me I’d like to share something personal with you.  Personal stories are riddled with vulnerability, yet telling them also demonstrates our strengths, because we let others know our struggles and our accomplishments.

I have gained the ability to share my own vulnerability with others without diminishing my strength.

I am very proud to be an ovarian cancer survivor and can confidently say that much of my strength —- and aversion to vulnerability — is derived directly from that experience.  At just 12-years-old, I put on a shield of emotional armor and fought against the cancer that threatened to take me away from my family.  It was many long months of terrible sickness. In reality, the doctors, the surgery, and radiation fought the cancer.  I was fighting against the absolute terror in the faces of everyone around me.  They were scared and I was scared, and rightly so.  So, as i saw it, I “took charge,” wearing my suit of kick-ass armor.  

Already a confident and “scrappy” girl I cried little and put on a brave face for everyone around me, especially my parents and my younger brother.  Heck, I was the girl that just weeks earier had four teeth pulled to make way for braces (badly needed!) and insisted on still playing my clarinet in a school show that night.  So, when everyone around me was frightened, I fought for them all, so they would know “I always win!”  The only time I remember crying in the least was as the anesthesiologist counted down as I lay on the operating table for the operation.  I have trouble identifying a time after that in which I allowed myself to cry in front of others.

It wasn’t until about 30 years later that it dawned on me that I was too damn SCARED to be the slightest bit vulnerable!  To do that meant to give in to the horrible fate that I saw reflected in everyone else’s eyes that one terrible summer.  I  had spent 30 years continuing to fight or flee from those feelings of vulnerability.  As you can imagine, changing up one’s “modus operandi” is very difficult when linked to such a traumatic experience.  It’s why we have therapists!  And, as it turns out… Improv!

The therapist, who helped me through some very difficult “tapping” sessions, assisted me in naming the trauma and my intense need to be the bravest and “least affected” person in the room.  To sum it up as simply as we did when I imagined myself back in the hospital room as an eighty-five pound 6th grader, I could have just said that I, too, was scared.  I could have let everyone else take on some of the burdens I believed to be all mine.  I could have just asked to be hugged.  Seems pretty simple now but just saying those words still leaves me feeling ill at ease, because that is vulnerability.  To me, that feels like weakness.  But during the summer of ’82, that meant the worst result imaginable.

So the therapist helped name the issue:  vulnerability.  But, improv is where I truly made friends with vulnerability and have been able to gradually embrace it as a strength instead of a weakness.  I perform with a tremendously talented all-female improv ensemble called Swim Team. About six months ago our team invited a guest coach to work with us.  She identified each player’s strengths and challenged each of us to try a different way of playing in order to balance out the entire ensemble.  If you haven’t guessed already, my strength was my ability to be bold, make strong choices, and take command.  My weakness?  NOT ENOUGH VULNERABILITY.  That day, we did a show in which I challenged myself to be “the most vulnerable person in the world” and it was freeing and cathartic as improv can often be.  Best of all, the entire ensemble just truly “gelled”.  We all played so well together, like the team of doctors from that horrible summer at Upstate Medical Center.  I let go of my fear and felt tremendous support from the rest of my teammates.  We had one of our best shows ever that night and I had more fun with them than ever before.

Improv is where I truly made friends with vulnerability and have been able to gradually embrace it as a strength instead of a weakness.

This was a great reminder that improv is not just about creating funny characters and heightening the antics that make for surprising delightful comedy.  It’s about being honest and raw and vulnerable with others.  Most great improv starts from a place of authentic connections.  So, I have the ability to say whatever is on my mind, which is a great strength, and through hundreds of improv practices and shows, I have been offering a less controlled, less armored, version of myself.  I am learning to be vulnerable on stage for my ensemble as well as in my life with my colleagues and friends.  I am grateful to have this art in which I can practice vulnerability without “real world” consequences.  I am letting others “pull weight” and “fight” when I think I have to do it all for everyone.

Theoretically, we all know we aren’t alone and don’t have to do it all.  Every now and then we are lucky enough to practice it and see it played out in earnest.  I want to leave you with a story about my favorite improv show I’ve played in.  It was a show with Swim Team, the same team I described earlier. Being a “middle-aged” woman, I am often developing scenes centered around my experiences with relationships, children, reproduction, and women’s rights. On this night we did a show whose theme was infertility and the many struggles and choices that come about from this: the fear, the sadness, wondering if and how to adopt, how it impacts our relationships, all of the deep, sticky, often icky to-close-to-home issues. We weren’t making stereotypical jokes, goofy choices, or hackneyed one-liners. We explored something real, honest, and personal.  And, I was vulnerable and played a woman who expressed their fears about ovarian cancer and her struggles with infertility, of which I could speak from the heart quite well about it.  We used comedy in order to open up the space and make room for this very difficult conversation, but in the end comedy really wasn’t the point, just like it probably isn’t for you in reading this blog post. The point that evening was to help us approach things that are difficult for us to approach otherwise and feel a little less alone in the world.

After the show, a woman from the audience approached me and told me that she had ovarian cancer that had left her infertile and so depressed that she had not left her home in months. That evening was the first time she went out, and the first time she had laughed since. She thanked our whole group for the experience and, of course, we were all moved to tears by the enormity of the connection we had created together. This night will always remind me of the power of improvised comedy and the ways in which it helps us grow both on stage as well as off stage.

If you’ve never tried improvisation before, I invite you to try one of our free Discover Improv workshops for absolute beginners.  Everyone there will be feeling just as vulnerable as you and if you stick with it I am absolutely confident that you will find more joy in your life.