I have always had a lot of both. Too much some might say. And still, there have been far too many times when I could not access either within my own soul. I didn’t have the grit or hardness I needed to push through something terrible, and I didn’t have the gumption to do it either. These were the times (and I suppose will still be the times) where I resorted to addictions, all of them. At first, they provided a relief, then they provided nothing at all. The relief was fleeting or not found at all and then there was just a lot of vacuous need unhinged.
I read this quote yesterday on one of the social media outlets, and I immediately felt seen. It was about bringing softness instead of survival tools to your life. And I thought at first, what a luxury to be able to go soft. To not be hard, metallic, gritty. Someone who can do that must have had an easy life to be able to make that choice.
But it was one of those things I thought about all day, this idea that softness was something luxurious from a life well protected. And I can tell you having divorced the super rich, money does not provide softness...I mean it CAN do that but most of the people I saw in their Montecito homes and their flush bank accounts had unspeakable acts of cruelty leveled at them or on them. Money just hid it from others better.
And with those thoughts remembered, I realized that softness is definitely a luxury but not the kind that comes from the absence of strife and struggle. Softness is the reward given those who are given every opportunity in life to harden but they don’t. They live through all the trauma and drama and make a decision to love anyway, to heal anyway, to see anyway, to hear anyway, to be vulnerable anyway. Usually people like this have wicked senses of humor, mostly aimed at themselves. A sarcastic wit and a great deal of humor create a safety that not even money could provide.
For a long time I thought I had to be tough, hard, metallic. And I will admit there are times when I long for the harder version of me, I want to say she experienced less pain, but I know better now. She just experienced the pain on an installment plan, and there was not less of it as she would like to believe. It actually takes quite a bit of effort to maintain that kind of facade.
So I am learning that softness is for those people who have survived the traumas of life and have healed them to the degree possible. Some traumas are just too great to ever heal, so they become a kind of open, festering wound that you deal with on the daily. Other traumas heal over and while never quite stop hurting, they do, in fact, heal for the most part. Then there are other traumas that you are able to find your own part and those you can heal completely. This is not to say that for all trauma to be healed you have to find your part, we all know there are a great number of things in this life that we are just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. We do not bring the awfulness upon ourselves, we are just in the way of someone else’s unhealedness and their own dysfunction and so we become their victims.
Some of us do volunteer for this though, and we can’t see our part in it forever. We are sure that we are fine and we can’t figure out why or how or when we signed up for all the abuse. For me, inventory, while being acutely painful, has been such a gift to me. Once I find out how I placed myself in a position to be hurt, I can change that, I can alter course and course correct. I CAN do it differently.
Some things in my life have been hard though to find my part. Delusion has played a big part in all of my denial. But I will tell you it is true that until you learn the lesson, you will just keep getting sent the same fucking lesson over and over again until you fucking learn. Mine have pretty much all had boy names, except for that last one...
But softness, being able to be loving, kind, hopeful, intimate, present and awake that is a gift of the highest order, one that only those who have survived and healed and made room within themselves are able to inhabit. Softness, is what happens, I believe when you take all the life circumstances that tried to make you hard, unyielding and brittle and you are able to soften all of that and push yourself into some other plane of existence.
And I do believe that a lot of that decision comes from allowing yourself to stay in situations that only provide for more opportunities for survival. If you want soft, you are gonna have to do the work. You are gonna have to do the healing. And you are going to have to develop harder barriers so that the softness can be protected and contained...otherwise, you and all your soft, loveliness will leak out everywhere all the time. And once all that soft gets spread out, there is nothing for it to do but harden.
And I can see now it was my inability to hold the boundaries, for myself and you that fucked me up most. I was in charge of maintaining my own integrity and I failed, repeatedly. I kept trying to outsource that job but in reality I was just acting out another addiction. And still I am not so sure of my ability to move through this world addictions all calmed and quieted. It seems that when I get control of two or three, some other new ones sprout up or re-engage from my past. I often feel like I am playing a shell game with myself except now my memory is faulty so I can’t fucking remember what fucking shell recovery is really under. And I insist on playing like twelve shell games with myself all the fucking time. It is an emotional circus over here, to be clear.
But I know that I have done the work to provide the place where softness can grow and reside. Softness has its rightful place in my life today. I have created a sanctuary around me and within me that allow for the softness to be cultivated and protected. And that feels pretty amazing. I hope this time I won’t slough it off to the lowest bidder. Please God, do not let me fucking do that again.
Letting go of people who have to make you live harder, grittier and impervious is a way to live, for sure. But it is not the way I want to live anymore. I want to keep my metal and moxie but I want to use those things about me that I like to protect, maintain and clarify my own softness, my own integrity, my own inner delicacy. Perhaps more than softness it could be called gentleness. A place where I do not have to go hard, and fast and hurried. But a place where I can lie in cloudy repose, floating on the lofty air that supports belief in such things as healing, sanctuary, peace and contentment.
Truth be told, I went hard for long enough. Whatever life brings to me now, I want to have the inner metal to survive it, but I want to do the work to arrive at a place where I can hold the pain in a loving way, in a soft way that is comforting, calming and attenuates all the lifeyness that befalls me on the daily.
And perhaps this is what true healing and reclamation looks like, finding within yourself a space for hard and a place for soft. And a protective figure within you that is capable of signing you up for a life that is other than just hard and painful and trauma laden. We pick the familiar hell over the unfamiliar heaven, but if we are really very lucky and have done the work, we can have the courage to find the softness which will lead us to that new nirvana that boasts a great amount of comfort, ease, and relief.
Again, still...
It will always come if we work for it.
This is my experience...it can be yours too.
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