When you wake up with a vulnerability hangover

"After I wrote it I had a vulnerability hangover," I said to an old friend as we sat talking about life and writing over dinner. "Isn't that the best term?" he said. He also writes, and often about close-to-the-heart topics where truth and poignancy emerge alongside some level of self-revelation. "I often get a vulnerability hangover after I post too."

We got the term from Brene Brown, whose book "Daring Greatly" we'd coincidentally both recently read. It's about shame, vulnerability, and resilience- thought-provoking in that that it's both research-based (Brown's a professional researcher on the topic of shame) and also rich in real life stories, mostly Brown's. Brown introduces the 'hangover' concept early in the book as she relays her experience of speaking about shame during a TED talk, her first ever. She writes: "The morning after the talk, I woke up with one of the worst vulnerability hangovers of my life. You know that feeling when you wake up and everything feels fine until the memory of laying yourself open washes over you and you want to hide under the covers?"