It’s all about vulnerability.

I’m more primitive than I’d like to admit.

Like the cavewomen who came before me, I am cautious and quick to judge, and I’ve got a finger hovering over the proverbial panic button at any given moment.

I can see this primitive streak play out as a storyteller, too: I’m more than happy to sit around the literal and metaphorical campfire telling tales in a way that’s designed to connect and make you feel a little bit better for having heard that story.

But I have no need for the spotlight. No stages and stadiums for me, thankyouverymuch. There are others who are made for places like this — the carriers of those stories who need the stages and stadiums to survive.?

These are artists of a different stripe — actors, musicians, dancers.

Primitive Me runs away from vulnerability, and that makes a lot of sense: My cautious-and-quick-to-judge ancestors were the smart ones, the ones who could quickly assess danger and either fight it, flee from it, or make friends with it.

My overly optimistic, “How-bad-could-it-be?” ancestors… They died out a long time ago. (RIP.)

But frustratingly and ironically enough, vulnerability is where people like us need to live.

In one of her TED Talks, Brené Brown says that vulnerability is the “birthplace of innovation, creativity and change… No vulnerability, no creativity. No vulnerability, no innovation."

You and I, we are always looking for things to create, ways to innovate. Our natural impulse is to more. Better. Evolved.

But if we’re going to get there from here, we have to make friends with vulnerability and emotional risk and —?yes —?failure.?

On a grand scale.

I don’t like it. Every part of me shuns it, runs from it. But I’m willing to give it a try.