Personal Reflection:
Some mornings you wake up armored without even trying. Shoulders tight. Voice low. Every small kindness feels like something meant for someone else. Perhaps it was a bad dream, or a fragment of a memory you thought was buried, rising just enough to shift the weight of the day before it even begins. This line lands right there—in that gap between what your heart remembers and what your body refuses to trust. Believing in tenderness on the days you can’t feel it isn’t delusion. It’s survival.
But let’s not pretend it’s easy. Disappointment builds scar tissue. Grief calcifies. Some hurts become fossils—old pain preserved in perfect detail, untouched but never truly gone. And some wounds never heal properly; they knit themselves together in crooked ways, reminding you that survival doesn’t always mean restoration. It’s hard to reach for softness when life has taught you to brace, to expect the hit, to map the exits before the door even closes behind you. Yet becoming requires a dangerous kind of courage: letting the walls down a fraction, enough for light to get in even if you’re still flinching. Tenderness is not weakness—it’s risk. And risk is where transformation waits.
Maybe today isn’t about feeling tenderness, but acknowledging the stubborn belief that it exists. And stubborn in the real sense—not noble or poetic, but the kind of hold you keep because letting go feels like losing one more piece of hope you can’t afford to misplace. A small, quiet truth you carry like a pilot light. Even when the world is loud. Even when your own heart feels far away. Becoming yourself means making room for what you cannot yet hold. Letting one soft thing survive the hard days. Trusting that tenderness, once allowed, knows how to find its way back.
Reflective Prompt:
Where in your life have you mistaken protection for absence?
Memoirs of Madness 