When Softness Learned My Name

There was a time when I believed that being soft made you easy to break. That vulnerability was a liability; that showing emotion meant giving people the blueprint to destroy you.

I saw strength as being impenetrable, untouchable, and unshaken.
I thought survival meant hardening myself, refusing to let people see my cracks, and carrying the weight of the world on my own.

But I wasn’t always in that mindset.

Before my first relationship, I was just a girl—trusting people, believing them, always assuming the best. Very much the girl next door. My mom used to swear I was trying to bring home every kid I met, convinced that I could save them from whatever life I made myself believe they were running from.

I had a soft heart, and I never saw that as a flaw. As I grew older, I became aware of how I was perceived. As the girl with no spine, no backbone. No will to stand up for myself. My ex said it. His family said it. My own mother said it. I was too nice, too forgiving, too naïve. And for a long time, I let their words confuse me. Because where was the line between softness and doormat?

I was taught that to be strong was to be invulnerable. I believed emotions made you easy prey. And the moment you let someone see your fears, sadness, or exhaustion, you are handing them ammunition. So I armored up. I swallowed my tears, bit my tongue, and held my breath. I equated silence with power, mistaking endurance for strength. But what I didn’t realize was that shutting myself off wasn’t making me stronger—it was making me smaller.

Softness Was Never the Problem

Softness is not weakness. It’s a decision.
A daily act of choosing yourself, your peace, your calm, your voice, without needing to prove anything to anyone.

It’s the art of standing firm without raising your tone. The power of holding space for others without abandoning yourself. It is learning that strength isn’t always loud or visible. Sometimes, it’s the quiet kind. The kind that sits with its truth and doesn’t flinch.

I used to think power meant control. That it meant never bending, never breaking, never letting anyone see me bleed. But that was fear pretending to be discipline. Real power, I’ve learned, is the ability to feel without falling apart. To walk away without resentment. To rest without guilt.

Softness doesn’t mean you lack boundaries. Instead, it means you’ve finally learned where to build them. It’s choosing peace over proving your point. It’s choosing grace over performance. It’s knowing when to speak and when silence says more.

To be soft is to be in command of your emotions, not enslaved by them.
It’s understanding that anger isn’t the only language of protection, and that grace can be just as sharp when used with intention.

I am done with the “strong Black woman” narrative.
I don’t need to survive my softness anymore. I get to live in it.
Because my softness isn’t the absence of power.
It is the evolution of it.

SOFTNESS IS REVOLUTIONARY

In a world that conditions us to be guarded, choosing to remain open, kind, and compassionate is an act of defiance. It is rejecting the idea that strength is synonymous with hardness. It is the refusal to let past wounds keep you closed off from the world. It is the radical belief that you are worthy of peace, of ease, of love, without having to earn it through struggle.

To stay kind in a world that thrives on cruelty takes courage.
To love again after betrayal? That’s defiance.
To rest when the world equates rest with laziness? Rebellion.

Softness is the quiet uprising of a woman who refuses to let the world turn her cold. It’s the audacity to stay human in an age that glorifies detachment. It’s walking through life without needing armor to feel safe in your own body. I came from a place of believing that softness meant allowing people to walk over me, and made it to a place of walking away when they even try.

My softness is the embodiment of boundaries. It’s peace that protects itself.

When Softness Found Me Again

It didn’t happen in a grand moment of enlightenment.
It came quietly, through exhaustion. Through a tired heart that didn’t want to fight anymore. Through mornings when the armor was too heavy to put back on.

One day, I woke up and realized I was done performing strength. I didn’t want to just survive my life. I wanted to live it. So I let myself feel again.

I cried in the shower without apology.
I stopped explaining my boundaries to people committed to crossing them.
I learned to sit in stillness without mistaking it for stagnation.
And slowly, softness learned my name again.

She came back like sunlight through a half-open curtain on a quiet Sunday morning. Not loud, not demanding, just there. And I realized she never left. I just stopped answering her calls.

I have learned that my ability to feel deeply, to nurture freely, to rest unapologetically — that is my rebellion.
That is my power.

And nothing is more dangerous than a woman who is soft,
and still —
free.