How to Be Soft Without Feeling Stupid

Notes from someone who has been practicing

I’ve been slightly obsessed with Hard by Hayley Williams lately. It’s one of those songs you put on thinking you’ll just listen once and then, eight days later, you’re still walking around your apartment singing about ribs as metal cages. There’s a line about how “armor’s heavy, never suited me at all” that keeps catching in my throat. Because the truth is, I know exactly what she means. Life has given me every reason to be hard, to stay armored up, to keep my softness hidden away like the good plates you only take out at Christmas. But I don’t want to be hard anymore. I want to learn what it feels like to be soft, even if softness still feels like the riskiest thing I could do.

There are days I ache to be soft. To fold into myself like fresh laundry, to let the world pass without bracing against it. But when you grow up with trauma, softness can feel like the most dangerous place you could possibly be.

For me, vigilance wasn’t a choice; it was survival. I learned early that the safest way to exist was to scan every room like a seismograph, picking up on tremors before they became earthquakes. A laugh that was slightly too sharp, a silence that stretched too long, my body knew to read these signs faster than I could spell my own name. I became a weather vane, twitching toward every shift in atmosphere. Hyper-vigilance was not a burden; it was a talent. It saved me, until it didn’t. Because when you live on high alert, the world becomes a minefield. Even joy feels suspicious, like a car parked too long outside your house. When will it leave? What does it want? How do I get rid of it before it explodes?

And yet, somewhere underneath all of that, I’ve always longed to be soft. To be the person who cries easily at weddings, who leans against someone without calculating whether they’ll move away. To say “I love you” without rehearsing every possible response in advance. Softness requires trust, though, and trust for people like me can feel like placing your throat in someone else’s hands.

So I’ve started treating softness the way other people treat exercise: as a discipline, a muscle to stretch and strengthen. It doesn’t arrive naturally. It has to be practiced in increments. I practice softness when I pause before sending a text, resisting the urge to rewrite it into something breezier, less needy. I practice it when I cry without apologizing for it, without turning my tears into a joke about hormones or exhaustion. I practice it when I say “I don’t know” in a meeting, or when I let someone hug me a second longer than I’d normally allow before breaking away.

It sounds small, and maybe it is. But softness is built out of these tiny allowances. It’s less about grand confessions and more about unclenching, piece by piece. The world rewards hardness. It rewards efficiency, detachment, the ability to smile through stress, to power through heartbreak, to look busy enough that no one suspects you’re unraveling inside. Trauma teaches you to thrive in that world. But living only in hardness is like living only on caffeine: it keeps you awake, but it doesn’t keep you alive.

Softness, I’ve realized, is the part of me that still wants to believe the world might be kind. It’s the part of me that still smiles at strangers, stops to pet dogs, and rushes to hold the door open. It’s the part that insists joy is not always followed by punishment, that love is not always withdrawn after it’s given. And maybe that’s the hardest thing softness demands of me: hope.

The other night, I walked home in the rain without rushing. Normally I would have ducked into the subway, head down, pace quick. But I let the drizzle soak through my hair, my clothes. I told myself: this is what softness looks like, too. Not fighting everything. Not armoring myself against weather I can’t control. I want more of that. More softness, more drizzles I don’t dodge, more laughter I don’t second-guess.

I may never be someone who trusts easily. I may always have the reflex to scan the room. But I can also be someone who learns softness not as the opposite of vigilance, but as its companion. Maybe true safety comes not from predicting every threat, but from allowing yourself, finally, to rest.

x,

Stephanie

If my writing made you nod along, feel a little less alone, or just gave you something to overthink later, consider buying me a coffee. It’s a small way to say, “Hey, keep doing the thing,” and I’d really appreciate it.