Exploring The Wreck: Intentional Vulnerability and Adrienne Rich

Years ago, working with Jayson Gaddis at The Relationship School out of Boulder, CO, one message I heard repeated over the 9 month course was “If you want to grow as fast as possible, be in an intimate partnership.”

I was always vaguely annoyed when I heard this proclamation. Partially, because I was single and being single was, at the time, a very good and healing thing in my life. Mostly, though, I was annoyed because I sensed it was true.

As a growth-obsessed human, I want to go all in. I want to unravel and lengthen and widen. I want to understand the thing itself and how it is built and why. As Adrienne Rich chronicles in her poem “Diving Into The Wreck”:

“I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.”

and

“the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth”

When I was a young college student, I assumed this poem was about a relationship. Though more nuanced and mature in my reading - Rich’s poem surely works for the hard stuff of growth, whatever that growth may be - it is my younger self who sensed something relationally dynamic in the metaphor. We cannot learn without going in, without diving in, and intimate partnerships are like no other learning place we can know by which to come to understand ourselves.

I spent three years single, healing and growing, learning necessary nuances about how relationships work. I spent time learning about my patterns, about where I had been and how to define where I want to go. I did the good, hard work. And, yet.

Our ability to be in intimate partnership requires we explore the wreck in relation to another. There are things we cannot learn until we “...crawl like an insect down the ladder / and there is no one / to tell me when the ocean / will begin.” And when the ocean begins, there are new lessons, new unknowns. But, as Rich notes, treasures, too. 

And the water is immediate. Expectations. Learned behaviors. Strategies for getting attention. Strategies for coping. Whether we are in a new relationship or an old known one, our ways of relating are rife with potentially problematic ways of seeing and being seen. Often, we are not initially in charge of these impulses. We are vulnerable and seeking, and as such, we hide in a myriad of ways.

My first ventures into dating were surprising. For all the work I had done, wouldn’t you know how fast I found myself quiet and vulnerable and hiding? Because there was no way to work through all of my coding, all of my learned protections, without jumping in and working through these with another. 

One of the first indications of the right person to spend time with, the person who could hang, the one I wanted around, was the one that could make some space for what I was bringing to the table - the intelligent, the funny, the kind, and the, at times, terrified. Because sometimes, when it’s good, it’s even more terrifying. And on the other side of terror, is that deep vastness we all crave. The place where we can begin to unfurl. 

Unfurling takes work. It takes safety. It takes trust and time. And what makes diving into the wreck an exploration and integration is our intentionality. If we are reading only a poor man’s “book of myths”, we will enter into partnership and expect that it will simply work or that it won’t. We will project onto our partner our expectations of who we want them to be instead of meeting them at who they are. And when we are working from who we want someone to be instead of seeing, celebrating, and making space for who they are, trust and communication are fraught. When we cannot trust and communicate and be accepted for who we are, we are constantly in a state of protection. There can be no true relating. There can be no unfurling. 

We must do the intentional work of making ourselves vulnerable as much as we must do the intentional work of allowing space for the other to be vulnerable. To meet them in vulnerability and not punish. 

What transforms us in relationship - as individuals and as a unit - is doing this intentional work. How we move with intentionality into why and how we communicate and relate is a correlate to our growth. Showing up when scared and braving the speaking of it. Looking at how we punish and how we hide. Talking these less flattering parts out and making a mutual effort to allow space for all our most loving gestures and our most afraid impulses. And this is also to say, defining what we are and are not willing to accept as we move deeper into our own worth. 

A duality of moving deeper into self-worth is allowing less the toxic behaviors you waded through previously while learning simultaneously to speak and allow more of who you are and what you require. 

We all come to the table scarred and calloused and hopeful. We bring our stuff. We navigate that stuff in the meeting of the other’s stuff. Here, we submerge:

“This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.”

May we choose to take the ladder down with intention, no matter how vulnerable it feels in the deep.

* “Diving Into The Wreck” by Adrienne Rich, 1973

https://poets.org/poem/diving-wreck