3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

Vulnerability is hard.

Fully feeling your feelings gets in the way of life. They slow you down, make you doubt, open you up to mockery and cause you pain.

Embracing your emotions sounds great in principle but feels frail in practise.

That being said, I want to try and prove to you that embracing vulnerability is true strength.

Who is truly the braver person… the one who lets themselves feel, or the one who flees the second an emotion gets too close?

The one strong enough to carry the full weight of their emotional experience, or the one so fragile that they have to suppress it?

We’re so quick to praise suppression as strength.

We call it control, we call it discipline, we pretend emotional detachment is a sign of maturity.

But fully living your life means actually feeling what happens, not just performing composure while something inside you quietly breaks.

The enemy here is toxic stoicism.

Not the grounded reflective kind, the hollowed-out kind.

The kind that rewards shutdown, that teaches you to be proud of how little you feel, as though restraint were the same thing as resilience.

Fearing vulnerability turns your inner world into a minefield.

It teaches you to treat emotions like threats, so you tiptoe carefully through your life trying not to set anything off.

Proud of your control but slowly growing more disconnected from life around you.

This isn’t strength, it’s avoidance rebranded.

The common mistake, especially among high-functioning, high-achieving people, is believing that vulnerability is weakness.

But vulnerability is being scared of speaking your truth, and doing it anyway.

It’s choosing presence before protection.

It’s the willingness to be seen, even when what’s visible isn’t tidy or filtered or finished.

Picture two people receiving bad news. One's hands shake as tears come. The other's face goes blank, jaw locked, and later that night they're three drinks deep, scrolling their phone, feeling nothing. Which one is really stronger - the one who can show their emotions, or the one who has to run from them?

Weakness is pretending you don’t feel. Strength is feeling deeply and staying open anyway.

We call it coping, but often it’s just abstaining from reality.

The executive who prides herself on being “unflappable” while quietly burning out. She calls it professionalism, but it’s really a fear of having her true self rejected.

The partner who insists “I don’t do drama,” when what they mean is “I can’t tolerate intimacy.” Every deep discussion becomes an emotional threat, so they fake calm at the cost of closeness.

The person who posts about the value of vulnerability online while being emotionally unavailable offline, fluent in the language of openness but allergic to the practice of it.

The society obsessed with “authenticity” but terrified of sincerity, rewarding shallow confessions that trend while punishing the real ones that linger.

The children who learn that silence equals safety, growing into adults who apologise for their needs before they’ve even voiced them.

The influencer culture that sells “performative rawness” as a brand, monetising emotion while sterilising its reality.

Different symptoms from the same disease - people who are so afraid of being broken by their feelings that they never let themselves be shaped by them.

The real fear isn’t just the emotion itself, it’s also what the emotion might not receive.

We’re not afraid of sadness, we’re afraid of being sad in front of someone who shrugs.

We’re not afraid of grief, we’re afraid of grieving and being judged for doing so.

That’s the abandonment we’re trying to avoid.

Even if we know that feeling our feelings is braver than denying them, the people around us still might think less of us for opening up.

So we keep things hidden.

Not because we want to, but because we don’t want to feel alone in the sharing.

Men have this harder still as almost all definitions of masculinity have some version of “emotional control” as a core tenet, which makes feeling pride in showing emotions as a man even tougher.

But you can’t connect with the world or anyone in it if you never truly show yourself.

Intimacy only exists to the degree that you reveal yourself - your sadness, anger, joy, desires, boundaries, everything.

When you hide your flaws or feelings out of fear of shame, you block intimacy and authenticity.

The more you expose, the closer you are. The less you show, the more distant you become.

Vulnerability isn’t weakness; it’s rebellion.

It’s not how little you feel that makes you strong, it’s how much you can face and stay open.

It's saying: “I’ll go first. I’ll be honest even when it’s scary.

Not because I’m fragile, but because I’m brave enough to be fully seen.”

​

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Chris Bumstead - how does it feel to retire from the top of your sport at 30 years old? What is life like after retirement? How quickly does an Olympia-level physique fall apart? So good. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Dr K HealthyGamer - why does resentment and pain drive us at the start of our journeys? How can we change to a more sustainable motivation after we’ve got some momentum? Will celebrating kill our edge?

Saturday.
Angelo Somers - the dangers of being too self aware. What to do when life feels pointless and why it keeps happening. How to overcome a teenage alcohol addiction coupled with reading too much nihilism.

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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​The paradox of manhood

"There’s a common belief that men are naturally dangerous — aggressive, predatory, criminally inclined.

In truth, the average man is only slightly more adventurous, slightly more aggressive than the average woman.

The difference is real, but it’s not dramatic.

The average man isn’t wildly different from the average woman when it comes to traits like courage, assertiveness, or even the tendency toward violence.

This creates a strange paradox. The worst men — the true predators — need to be constrained.

They need less boldness, less aggression, less entitlement.

But the rest — the vast majority — need the opposite.

They need encouragement.

They need to be challenged to step up, take risks, and take responsibility.

The problem is, most public conversations don’t make this distinction.

They flatten the male experience into one story.

But blanket advice doesn’t work.

A society that wants to flourish has to learn how to contain the worst men and cultivate the best ones." — Rob Henderson

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2.
​Trajectory is more important than position.

“It is so much more fun to be a little richer than you were yesterday, than merely to be rich.” — Alice Wellington Rollins

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3.
​Pick carefully.

“You're not choosing a girlfriend, you're choosing your son's mother.” — Eric Jorgenson

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LIFE HACK

I made a playlist of my favourite music.

I’ve got lots of requests to make a list of the music I listen to, including all the stuff that features in vlogs and the band t-shirts I wear.

Seamlessly moves from metal to DnB to country to ambient deep house.

Enjoy - https://chriswillx.com/bangers
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Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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