In defence of the soft life

Redefining strength when you're tired of being strong.

I wore it like Olympians tattoo gold rings on their upper back. I thrived in it. Wore a coat of armour dry-cleaned in the chemicals of everything I believed strength was. I know how to be strong. I’ve known it since I was a child. I was a little woman at eight, transported into inner adulthood when I realised I had to be strong to survive. That if my mum never made it out of hospital, then I’d have to look after myself. I couldn’t see all of the people around me who loved me, who I rationally knew would look after me. I didn’t want them. I wanted her. If I didn’t have her, then I guess I had to be strong.

She made it. Luckily, she made it.

I didn’t have the same scars as her surgeries gave her, but I had a new scar that made its way inside me, reminding me that I had to always be strong. The scar came with a catchy jingle to the tune of, “I do it myself”. Getting louder as more painful experiences crashed into my life. The experiences that became my evidence file. Giving me proof. The “I can’t trust anyone but myself”, proof. “I can only rely on myself to stay alive”, proof. “See how you get hurt when you are soft”, proof.

The jingle continued. It continued as my role as the “strong one” deepened.

People needed me. People depended on me. I fixed things. I was called on to make their ouches go away. I was happy to. Isn’t this just what we do? I stopped having needs of my own. Always meeting someone else’s. My ex boyfriend’s friends would always remind me that if I left he wouldn’t survive. Be a good girl, suck the abuse up. What about him? You can save him. You changed him. We don’t know what will happen to him if you weren’t here. He’s not strong, you know. But, you are.

I am strong.
I am strong.
I am strong.

I would recite it in my sleep like a haunting lullaby. Trying to convince myself that strong girls like me can go through anything, take anything, forget everything. That if only I kept saying “I am strong” enough times I could muffle the sounds of him mocking me, calling me the N-word, never keeping his word, trying to get me to have sex with him when he was drunk then laughing in my face when I said no, shouting at me, saying that I’m an animal even when we weren’t together, texts saying he would destroy me.

"Why are you crying Giselle, I’m just joking..."

I am strong.
I am strong.
I am strong.

The call was coming from inside the house. I didn’t think I was allowed to be soft. How can you survive when you’re soft? Am I even worthy enough to be soft? Good enough to be soft? How could I ever possibly survive if I’m not hypervigilant and “keeping the watch”? Bad things happened when I let my guard down. I didn’t have the luxury of being soft. I see it as a spectrum, where in one direction, there’s hyper-independence right at the end. In the other there’s co-dependence. Sitting comfortably on a swing right there in the centre is interdependence. I spent most of my life leaning very far into hyper-independence. I didn’t need anyone. No thanks. I polished my strength trophy each night. Because, guess what?

I DO IT MYSELF.

Secretly. Silently. In the cavernous wiring of my subconscious I resented it. I was exhausted from being the strong one. I wondered if girls like me could ever know ease. I wanted to feel truly and completely held by someone other than my mum. I wanted a dad. I wanted to be in the middle, healthily independent and also interdependent. The call to be strong, also came from outside the house, though. The demands, stereotypes and sometimes conscious but often unconscious expectations that are placed on Black women to be strong. I wrote about this recently for Black Skin Directory:

“If Black women are indeed labelled as strong, then who will protect us? If Black women are so strong, then does it mean that we are unable to feel pain? If we are stronger than other women, are we supposed to stay silent and just take whatever comes our way? When life is life’ing are Black women supposed to wear slogan tees that shout, “don’t worry, I’ve got this”, because what if we don’t “got this”?”

We see this and I have felt this play out in workplaces and all areas in my life. I have seen my mum not being listened to in appointments, because surely it’s not that bad? I’ve witnessed my pain and needs ignored in friendships, because surely my needs are not as important as theirs. I’m the strong one remember. Stay quiet. Don’t ask for anything. You’re a vessel to be taken from not to be poured into. I’ve asked for perfectly reasonable things in employment that others have asked for. I’ve sent emails asking for what I am owed and received replies with this distinct air of “You’re asking for too much”. Strong Black Women don’t need anything, right? I’ve seen this far too many times on social media where whenever anything happens in the world, Black women are constantly asked to either help educate or shouted at for not saying anything. The demands placed on us and even worse, expected of us, are exhausting and they have real world impacts on us on our bodies and minds.

Public health researcher Dr Arline T. Geronimus, details some of this in her book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life on the Body in an Unjust Society. She explains, “Weathering is about hopeful, hardworking, responsible, skilled, and resilient people dying from the physical toll of constant stress on their bodies, paying with their health because they live in a rigged, degrading, and exploitative system.”

She goes on to say that, “weathering afflicts human bodies — all the way down to the cellular level — as they grow, develop, and age in a systemically and historically racist, classist society.”

I can’t change those systems, but I can do something about it for myself. I am still working on reducing the stress in my body, but one of the focuses in therapy that I started working on about four years ago, that I am the most proud of, is the intention to be soft. Soft with myself. Soft in love. Soft, everywhere. It’s taking all the strength I could cultivate to look at it, work on it, stay with it, stay with it, stay with it, until I can now say that I embody it. I can’t say that I’m soft with myself come morning, noon and night, but I am soft and after nearly 26 years of not knowing what that was, I am going to shout it from the nearest Instagram-able rooftop bar that I am a member of the soft life club.

I have a responsibility to myself to be soft in a world that expects me to be strong. I am not going to ignore all the issues with the commercialisation of said “soft life” but if it means that people can better cope and survive under all of the systems we live in, I will always be down for that.

I chose to dedicate a significant amount of energy and time to shifting from strength to softness, because I have been strong my entire life. It has ruined so many things, but mostly the relationship I used to have with myself. Put simply: Now I refuse to suffer. I refuse to be an accomplice to the pain that people and circumstances have inflicted on me. I will feel it. For as long as it takes to feel it. I won’t blame myself for it, but I will grieve. I will scream. I will be intimate with the pain. I will go into the cruel arms of asking myself without judgement, if I contributed to it. Then, I will do something about it, because it’s my responsibility to do something about it. During the times when I don’t have the capacity to do it alone, I will do it hand in hand with others to support me, but I will do it. I will always do it. And doing “it”, often looks like being soft and slow with myself and allowing that same softness in.

I’m over the being anti-everything, for the sake of it movement. I don’t like hot take culture. I don’t care for reacting to things without sitting with them. I’m not interested in reading one person’s experience, having a visceral reaction to it and then expecting your reaction to be everyone else’s. I don’t believe in self-editing, but sometimes it’s okay to write things in your journal and process it before writing a whole social media post on it.

I think critically about everything, even the things that don’t need it, but in Mission Softness, I know how to not make everything mean something. I can watch the shittiest reality TV show and write a 50,000 word thesis on what the characters can teach us about our humanness. But, I can also watch TV and just watch the damn TV. As soon as posts around soft life reached our consciousness, it came tumbling down. I agree with it a lot of the debates around it. Yes, it can be tied up in conspicuous consumption, there are conversations about privilege and who has the luxury to rest or have ease and who doesn’t, capitalism as always, and collective care vs self-care. All the things. So many things. I know the things, I also exist at the intersection of many of them. Black women resting and at ease is not part of our cultural diet, which is why Danielle Mckinney’s paintings of Black women doing just that, means so much to me.

A soft life isn’t for everyone. We also get to create our own versions of what that is. Self preservation is a part of softness work. As a slow living advocate, I live and breathe this. While I personally value a life of rich experiences, deep presence, frolicking and more frolicking, I never tell people to quit their jobs (I know poverty all too well) and just mindlessly luxuriate. My work exists to create perspective shifts, where we go beyond slow living as apathy and inertia wrapped up in gingham sundresses, and instead into finding meaning in each day, connecting to joy, choosing ourselves over hustle culture and healing without the burden of perfection. I never give hour long meditations and practices, because honestly who has the time. I believe in little moments of being in between big moments of doing. I believe in softness and slowness reminding us of why we’re here… which is just to be here, savouring it all.

I live with softness in my soul, but there will always be a place for strength. I know I am strong and I am also so much more than my strength. I have rewritten my strength, giving it new language, shredded the definition from my internal dictionary and started anew.

Strength is me saying, “no I can’t do this for you today, but I can tomorrow.” Strength is never giving up on myself. Strength is frolicking wildly and resting deeply. It’s giving and receiving in reciprocity. It’s showing up for people who I know show up for me. It’s a lot of, “fuck this shit”. It’s forehead kisses and being read to. Strength is being taken care of, knowing that I deserve to be taken care of, and letting myself be taken care of. Strength is boundaries. It’s me being soft with everyone I know to teach softness in action. Strength is being soft, because one can’t exist without the other.

I am devoted to living slowly and softly. I write for hours and read books until I need to rub my eyes. I wake up when I want to and eat what I like. I’m never in a rush. I picnic and whisper love songs to the trees. I let wildflowers graze my knees, kiss for hours as if the clock doesn’t exist and get kicked out of restaurants for smiling into my friend’s eyes way past our two hour slot. I will not work hard to be free one day, I will work intentionally to be free now. I will continue to give as much as my heart can, and keep learning how to receive in equal measure. I will live slowly and softly when the world shouts at me to do the opposite, as I am simply not prepared to make any life choices that will take me away from who I am.

I am soft.
I am soft.
I am soft.