Traveling home at the end of a really hot day, I got to Grand Central Terminal and made my way down to the 7 train like I always do.

A friend of mine slipped on the ice and broke her ankle one winter and was laid up for weeks and weeks. As I expressed my sympathy for her misfortune and suffering, a surprising phrase slipped out of my mouth.

The pragmatist philosopher-activist Jane Addams in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), examined the great gap that she believed was then opening up between “old” and “new” ways of thinking about poverty.

Why is it so hard to be vulnerable? Vulnerability is both necessary to create the real connections we crave as human beings, and it involves the risk of being rejected for the true and vulnerable selves that we might share with others.

Over ten million people have now watched online a 20-minute talk called “The Power of Vulnerability.” It’s a talk by Brené Brown, a researcher on the topic.

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge or annihilation.