I want to be soft again

I am holding space in my sensitive heart for the joy and goodness left in the world, and using this as my fuel to push forward.

It seems I have inadvertently taken a break from thinking about the end of the world.

After having a bit of a menty b about everything that is going on right, I tried to do what was best for my sanity and take a step back for a little while. ¹

But now I find myself in a little bit of a limbo.

As I begin to engage with and understand all the new horrors that I have missed, I have struggled to re-harden the emotional walls I had built up around myself.

Heavy topics I would consume in articles, social media, and books over a morning coffee or during a work break suddenly became too much to handle. I hadn’t felt that quickening pulse and queasy feeling of reading the goings on in the world for quite a while, and it has come back with a vengeance.

But it’s made me realise I don’t want to harden myself anymore. I think I want to feel the world in its full force, in its unpleasantness and all. As the wonderful

Ettie Bailey-King

wrote in her piece A manifesto for joy; ‘It isn’t about hiding from the pain of the world. It isn’t about “protecting your peace”. It’s about knowing the darkness and choosing joy despite it.’

I’m trying to find the balance of being awake in a society hurtling itself off a cliff without wanting to hurtle myself off a cliff. To learn how to lean in when I can and lean out when I can’t (and to be grateful for the fact I can lean out).

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However, what I’ve noticed when discussing these feelings with others, is that we often end the conversation with a shrug and a sigh, telling ourselves that this is just the way humanity is.

With the underlying idea that it's easier to hate humanity and think everything is fucked and then to believe good people exist–or even that things could ever be different.

I think this is because it’s easier on the soul to think everything is shit and everything is awful than it is to believe humans are innately 'good' and sometimes do very 'bad' things. (There are issues with the good/bad dichotomy, but this way of presenting it is just for simplification.)

If we think everything is shit and awful, and always has been shit and awful, then we don't have to do anything differently. I find it’s easier to hate humanity as a whole than to allow the belief into our heart that people are just trying to live the best life they can, with the tools they have been given–and sometimes this causes them to make very bad decisions.

I don’t blame anyone who falls into this way of thinking. When you are constantly being bombarded by bad news and repeatedly disappointed by the government and wider society, then of course you’d protect yourself by building up your walls and hardening your emotions.

But once we crystallise our emotions, it becomes so much more difficult to believe another way of living could ever be possible, that anything could ever be different.

And perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps humans have always been horrible to each other, and enjoyed dominating the place they called home. But I believe holding this idea that everyone and everything is horrible cuts us off from the possibility that things could be good, that humans are innately good.

To constantly and unmovingly assume that we live in a dog-eat-dog world doesn’t leave any space for a better way forward. We believe that this is ‘the way things are’ and then stomp down any idea down before we even give it the chance to breathe. This way of seeing things weighs so heavily on our own shoulders and threatens to flatten any sparkle of good we still see.

Why do we allow other’s beliefs or expectations of the world to deform the way we see our surroundings? To warp the ways we truly want to live? Why would we ever let anyone tell us what is expected or realistic about the futures we dream for, or the ways in which we view humanity?

Being gentle and thoughtful and hopeful and loving is so, so, so hard right now–yet it’s exactly the thing we need to usher in a better future.

I used to believe I had to be a loud and angry activist to get anything done. I used to believe I had to hold the weight of the world on my shoulders with anger that fuelled action. But I’m realising I don’t need to be this way. I can be gentle, tear-y, and soft. I can hold space in my sensitive heart for the joy and goodness left in the world, and use this as my fuel to push forward.

This is how I am approaching my future from now on.

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.

1. Obviously, I feel I am in a very privileged position to be able to step back from these problems like this. There is not much more I can say other than I am lucky for being born where I was born to the people I was born to.