On Softening
Last week, I was running a trail with our dog who loves to break into a sprint on a downhill or for a squirrel or a floating leaf. I am profoundly aware of how ludicrous it is to charge through the woods with a ninety-pound puppy who has no self-control. I did, in fact, fall pretty hard near the end of the trail. I stood up feeling grateful that I could stand and that my knees were still there. Then I looked at my hands and felt my stomach drop. Seeing your own body cracked open is uncanny in a way that forces you to look at your own fragility. A few hours later, my dislocated finger had been set, and I have leaned into typing while wearing a splint. It’s slow work.
The truth is I have run thousands of miles on more technical trails. It is also true that I know how to take a fall on a trail. Regardless of these little truths I cling to, there is no way of knowing what will happen when I choose to throw myself wholeheartedly into the joy and terror of racing over roots and rocks. I may find myself in situations where I need to use duct tape and a t-shirt to stabilize a sprained ankle on the summit of a mountain. Or something less specific.
A lot of life remains uncertain regardless of how we build resilience or how much effort we invest in our habits or how many truths our bodies come to hold across our lives. While we cannot predict how things will unfold for us, as Esther Perel puts it, our attitudes about the unknown tell us at least a little about what we will discover there. Most of the time, running around in the woods is not a huge threat, and I typically approach the experience with a desire to discover something new about the sacred act of being alive in a body.
In this way, I can soften into the experience with love and freedom in my movement. It is easy to choose this attitude for a practice I love. Softening into the other spaces of life—particularly into our relationships—is far more complex. Our scripts for existing in our society often ask us to avoid being soft or vulnerable, promising that if we just work harder, push through difficult things, and focus on productivity we will arrive at the meaningful life we seek.
Softening is resistance. It is a position we choose, an attitude we embody, that extends the knowledge that we belong to each other in spite of difficulty. Softness allows us to admit we will not always get things right, that we will be hurt and we will hurt others. Vulnerability is like oxygen for connections, but it is also true that we need boundaries that protect our time, emotions, and energy. How to do both?
We’re surrounded by thousands of scripts for self-improvement and optimization, all of which promise that our performance will lead to fulfillment.1 If we can be productive enough and in the correct ways, we will finally arrive at self-actualization and prosperity. Many of these scripts focus on habits that do, in fact, have beneficial outcomes for our health and wellbeing: regular exercise, quality sleep, nourishment, time management, and the list goes on in perpetuity. Of course, habituating ourselves to practices that invite stability and growth (especially when we are coping with difficult events), can bring peace and grounding to our life.
But what happens around and within us as we orientate toward production and performance over vulnerability and connection? Constant optimization leaves little space for our lives to spill over into the spontaneous, into joy and intimacy, deep affection, curiosity, and wonder. Now, I am not suggesting that we should abandon habits and routines that ground us in our daily life. But I am looking at a dominant idea that our efforts to optimize will protect us, sustain our well-being, and eventually lead to fulfillment.
Dominant scripts for self-improvement offer clear, actionable steps to perfect ourselves around a social standard that is very rarely possible for most to maintain. But connection with each other remains a far more significant element for our wellness than biohacking. The difficulty with connection is that it is often quite messy. There are ways we can develop secure and loving bonds, but this requires effort that we are less motivated to make when the outcomes are uncertain.
Connection requires risk in ways that running a marathon does not (and yes, I am calling myself out here). Opening ourselves to others requires vulnerability—asking to be seen and known and loved means that we have to be willing to accept the possibility of harm and loss. This kind of love and connection requires effort, an effort that is not directed at achievement. Secure, safe, lasting relationships require us to face ourselves and deal with the parts that we do not have to deal with otherwise.
It is, in so many ways, much easier to run a marathon than to cultivate vulnerable, deep, and secure attachments. They are different categories, but our social scripts tend to recognize and reward the outcomes of productivity over the outcomes of slow, soft, healing work. When I tell people that I run marathons, I get reactions of admiration and awe. It would be dishonest to say I don’t enjoy this, but it does reveal something about how we honor labor, discipline, and endurance. Do we honor connection, vulnerability, and healing with the same enthusiasm?
I am very comfortable talking about the work I’ve done in trauma therapy and recovery over the last several years, but I don’t typically receive rapturous awe for this labor. The responses I do receive—earnest expressions of support, gentle offers of prayer—reflect how we’ve been socialized to see therapy and inner work as indications of weakness and brokenness, when in fact this is quite simply the difficult labor of becoming safely embodied, securely attached, and emotionally regulated. Our efforts to self-improve in other ways—building muscle, running faster, winning awards—are perceived as signals that we are virtuous, hard-working people. I’m not suggesting we should avoid praising these accomplishments (keep telling me my marathons are impressive), but I wonder what would happen in our communities if we validated and rewarded efforts to heal and integrate our relational pain in the same way?
I’m not suggesting that we should avoid praising these kinds of accomplishments (read: no need to stop telling me that marathons are impressive), but I wonder what would happen in our communities, in our social connections if we validated and rewarded efforts to heal and integrate our relational pain in the same way? And I don’t just mean that we should high five each other for going to therapy (although, I love a good high five). Instead, I am thinking about our attitudes toward healing. How do we soften with each other?
I am loathe to prescribe methods or strategies or action steps we can take to become softer, more vulnerable, and deeply connected. It seems more important that we orientate ourselves to softening as a way of listening to each other and creating space for the many layers of what connects us to each other. As we enter the darkest, coldest time of year, our energy gets stretched thin and we might need more rest than usual. In this space, my hope for all of my dear ones is that we extend a soft grace to ourselves and to each other—perhaps by noticing when we’re pushing through exhaustion, by allowing a conversation to meander, by saying “I don’t know” more often, by letting ourselves be unproductive and unmeasured. As we are about to be bombarded with New Year’s resolutions, I invite you to reflect on what it means to be resolute about anything—do we need to be more resolute in our daily lives? What might it mean to soften into the New Year instead?
Jia Tolentino writes about this in her essay “Always be Optimizing" in Trick Mirror. Highly recommend every essay in that collection.
