The Architecture of Softness
There are days when the urge to disappear feels like protection; a familiar safety dressed up as isolation. I feel tired of trying, overwhelmed by the effort it takes to emotionally unclench. For a writer whose capacity for commitment extends only as far as a weekly newsletter—a challenge in itself—the idea of "staying" often feels like a foreign language. My Gemini moon favours the spark, the intrigue of beginnings, not the patient, slow grind of routine.
It was during one of these moments, tempted to retreat, that I was confronted by a single line from a medium article:
“I don’t want my sensitivity to be buried just so loving me could be easy.”
I read it standing up, then reread it sitting down. It followed me everywhere, articulating a fear I’ve carried for years: the belief that softness and tenderness are flaws I must dim to make myself tolerable. I realized I’ve spent too many seasons trying to be easy to love, instead of simply allowing myself to be fully loved.
This realization connected me back to a moment in July 2019, when I traveled to Paris for my birthday. Something about that city unsettled me in the most necessary way; it felt like it was pressing a hand against the softest, most guarded parts of me.
Paris is not warm in the way postcards pretend—not the Eiffel clichés or the romance montages. It is dirty pavements, cracked walls, and beauty tangled with fatigue. Paris is not instantly obvious. You don’t visit the city; you learn it. It demands that you wander, that you surrender to its demands, and it reveals itself only after you stop performing.
I remember walking alone along the Seine at night and thinking about love: If I ever fall in love with a woman, it must feel like this; a city I could spend a lifetime exploring and still never fully know. It must be deep, not dramatic; discovery, not spectacle; peaceful, not perfect.
Back then, I didn’t realize the city was teaching me about softness—about what it feels like to be held, to be learned, to be known beyond your surfaces. Only now, after a year of grief and undoing, do I understand: Paris was showing me the shape of the love I never believed I could have.
This past year has challenged me in ways I don’t have neat sentences for; loss, grief, disappointments, and rebuilding. This season broke the concrete inside me. I grew up thinking softness was something I had to barter for safety, but the brutal process of grief taught me something radical: softness is not weakness; it is what strength feels like when it finally breathes.
If strength is what keeps you upright, softness is what allows you to survive. I am learning to let go of the urge to rush my own healing and the belief that I must earn tenderness. I am releasing those old versions of myself that survived for me but cannot lead me now. Softness isn't a reward I wait for; it is a practice I cultivate: letting myself cry without rehearsing reasons, choosing community with people who call just to hear my voice, and believing that tenderness is intelligence, not fragility. I am learning that rest is not a failure but an act of defiance.
I want this chapter of my life to feel like Paris: messy, layered, unhurried, soulful, full of corners that surprise me back into life. To be known, to be learned, to be discovered gently over time; that is the presence I want to claim.
Softness is not fragility, it is architecture: A city you grow inside, a place someone enters with reverence, not conquest. It is revealed only to those who linger long enough to notice you.
My wish is for us all to treat our hearts like a city worth wandering, refusing the people who want shortcuts to our depth. May we remember that softness is not weakness, it is high-maintenance sacredness.
Love; real love; learns you the way a good city does: layer by layer.
May you allow yourself to be learned—slowly, tenderly, without rushing the process. You are not a destination. You are a landscape worth returning to. May this be the chapter you don’t abandon yourself.