how to not let this world turn you to stone

the quiet rebellion of staying soft in a world that worships sharpness.

“Lady and the Tiger” Frederick Stuart Church

softness is not trending. the world has a fetish for edges—polished résumés, hot takes, hustle. we glorify resilience that looks like stone, not silk. but here’s the truth: nothing alive is hard all the way through. muscle, fruit, earth, even steel under heat—everything softens eventually. the real trick isn’t staying hard. it’s learning how not to shatter when you do.

we call it strength when someone stops crying. when they keep walking through the fire without flinching. but there’s another kind of power—the kind that trembles and still steps forward, eyes wet, heart open. softness is not weakness; it’s stamina with skin. it’s choosing permeability in a world built on walls.

think of a stillroom—the old, fragrant chamber where herbs steep slowly in glass jars. no flame licks the bottom of the pot. the heat is steady, the transformation invisible. that’s softness: heat without boil. SIMMER DOWN! the art of allowing change without forcing it. the world outside is obsessed with eruption, but in the stillroom, alchemy happens through patience, not violence.

our culture worships Stoicism (capital S), marble statue Stoicism. the roman kind that teaches mastery through suppression, virtue through detachment. there’s something seductive about that discipline, the fantasy of being untouchable. but real endurance doesn’t come from refusing feeling—it comes from metabolizing it. Marcus Aurelius might have conquered emotion through reason, but what would it look like to conquer through compassion instead? maybe the new stoicism (little s) isn’t the absence of pain, but the capacity to hold it tenderly.

in feminist thought, softness has long been political. Audre Lorde called it the erotic—the power of feeling deeply and refusing to numb. Bell Hooks wrote about love as a radical act, a way of surviving systems designed to make us small. to stay soft, in that lineage, is to resist the economies of hardness—patriarchy, capitalism, perfectionism—that thrive on our disconnection. tenderness, then, is not apathy. it’s protest. it’s what burns quietly beneath the surface when the world demands that we become efficient machines.

Walt Whitman:“i am large, i contain multitudes.” he might as well have been talking about emotional permeability. to stay soft is to stay multiple—to let joy and grief, anger and grace, live in the same breath. the world tells us to streamline, optimize, pick a feeling and stick to it. but softness resists categorization. it’s the art of holding contradictions without collapsing.

burnout culture thrives on compression. it prizes output over texture, function over feeling. to stay soft in that system is a refusal—a refusal to be flattened into productivity, to measure worth by exhaustion. softness says: i am not a resource to be extracted. i am a body, a pulse, a breath. it’s not laziness. it’s reclamation.

(crying as i write this part): if you’ve ever been heartbroken and still reached for love again, you’ve practiced it. if you’ve ever stayed kind in the face of cruelty, or listened when silence would have been easier, you’ve chosen it. softness is not instinct; it’s discipline. it asks you to stay in the room when your body begs to flee. it’s the small, daily act of saying: i will not let this world turn me to stone.

and yes, it hurts. to be soft is to bruise. to wake up in a world that prizes detachment and still decide to feel everything—it’s excruciating. but that ache is data. it tells you where your boundaries are, where your love still lives. as the poet nayyirah waheed writes, “feel everything. that is the difference between existing and living.” softness keeps you alive to your own becoming.

we talk about resilience like it’s a rebound, but sometimes it’s an absorption. i always come back to the willow tree. she follows me through every point of distress in my life. the willow doesn’t break because it bends. the body doesn’t heal by tensing—it softens around the pain, makes space for it, metabolizes it. that’s the biology of tenderness. that’s evolution. and may i be so daring to claim, everything i have ever healed from, whether physically or emotionally, has been as a result of my softness, and my bends. NOT by my rigidity, and sure as hell not by strengthening my edges.

the stillroom is an invitation: steep, my loves. don’t boil. transformation that lasts is never violent. when you let yourself steep, your heat becomes sustainable. you stop burning out. you learn to glow instead of combust. you stop flinching when life turns up the flame.

so ask yourself: where have you gone rigid in self-defense? where have you mistaken coolness for composure, distance for peace? the world, and your ego, will tell you to toughen up—but what if your power lies in melting a little? what if the strongest thing you could do is stay soft enough to feel the pulse of your own aliveness?

this is not self-help. this is survival. in an age of irony and detachment, tenderness is the last taboo. to care deeply, to stay permeable, to love without armor—that’s the revolution. that’s the plot twist.

because to stay soft is to stay awake. and the world doesn’t need more sleepwalkers—it needs people who feel everything and still choose to love. that’s the heat worth holding.

and dare i say, i love you.