Season of Self: The Power of Softness
How embracing softness allows us to access deeper healing, rest, and transformation
Reclaiming Softness: The Strength in Letting Go
For so much of my life, I have held everything together.
I have run my own business for years, ensuring that every piece moved seamlessly. Then we expanded, adding a lawn service. Then came more tiny humans, more responsibilities, and more moving parts. Contractors, schedules, money, equipment, everything landed on my plate. There was always something to manage, something to organize, someone depending on me. Add in one child starting college while I was still breastfeeding another with a toddler wrapped around my leg, and WHEW.
Outwardly, I had to perform—had to appear strong, capable, and unfazed. I was the one people leaned on. I was the one who made sure everything ran smoothly. But where was the space to not have it all together?
There were only small pockets of softness in my life, and one of those places was with my then-husband.
I like to remember that it wasn’t always the way it ended, and I am thankful for the love we shared and the way he taught me—without words—that it was okay to be soft. Because he was soft with me. Not in the way the world dismisses or mocks softness, but in the kind of softness that makes you feel safe enough to exhale.
He held space for me, allowing me to just be. He made room for it—not by demanding it, not by making me feel like I had to perform some version of softness, but by creating an environment where I could lay it all down. He never needed me to be the perfect version of myself. He allowed me to be the messy, exhausted, undone version, and he met me there. In those moments, I didn’t have to perform. I didn’t have to lead. I could sink into the tenderness of existing without expectation. And that was a radical kind of care that I had not experienced before; he loved me well. In turn, I was able to offer him the same softness and place to be vulnerable.
I think about that often, about how softness isn’t gendered, about how dangerous it is that we have been taught otherwise.
Softness Isn’t Gendered—Supremacy Culture Made It That Way
We have been sold the lie that softness belongs only to the feminine and that even then, it must be controlled—gentle but not weak, nurturing but not needy, emotional but not too much. Women are told to be soft for others but not for themselves.
And men? Men are told that softness is a threat. That to express emotion, to move with tenderness, to embody care in a way that isn’t forceful or dominant is to fail at being a man.
And where does that leave us all?
Hardened. Disconnected. Convinced that to survive in this world, we must armor ourselves against it, against each other and against our own natural inclination to be vulnerable.
Supremacy culture demands this of us. It tells us that to be worthy, we must be strong. That to be valuable, we must be productive. That to be respected, we must be unshaken. It turns softness into a privilege rather than a birthright.
But here’s the truth:
Softness was always ours.
Before capitalism. Before colonization. Before we were taught to equate rest with laziness and emotion with weakness—our people knew how to be soft.
The Ancestral Memory of Softness
Our ancestors held softness in ways that were stolen from us.
They rested. They moved with the rhythms of the land, pausing when the seasons called for stillness.
They gathered. They did not carry burdens alone but sat in circles, holding space for one another’s grief, joy, and stories.
They cared for each other. They knew that survival was not about self-reliance but about deep interdependence.
Softness was not a weakness—it was the very thing that sustained them.
And then came the disruptions.
Christianization, Feudalism, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, colonialism, forced labor, and industrialization—systems that ripped softness away and called it progress. They told us that stillness was laziness, that care was indulgence, that if we were not constantly producing, we were falling behind.
And we have suffered for it.
We carry generations of exhaustion in our bones. Our nervous systems are wired for survival, for vigilance, for bracing against harm. But deep in our DNA, we also carry the memory of softness. The knowing that we were not meant to live this way.
This work is not just about reading—it’s about unlearning, healing, and creating a world where we can finally exhale.When you subscribe, you’re not just supporting my writing, you’re investing in a space where we dismantle supremacy culture and build something more liberatory together.