I used to think that by a certain point—somewhere in your thirties, maybe—life would settle. That after enough sharp turns and false starts, you’d arrive at something like clarity.
And in some ways, you do. You start to know yourself a little better. Some choices get easier. The noise quiets, at least a little.
But I didn’t expect how much the world would keep widening. The closer you look—at yourself, at others—the more contradiction you find. The more you understand, the harder it becomes to judge anything simply. And the things that matter most—grief, love, identity, meaning—don’t resolve. They stay open. Learning to live with that openness becomes its own kind of maturity.
Hardship can shape you in different ways. It can harden you. Or it can soften you.
I want to stay soft.
Not fragile—just open. Able to be moved. Able to keep noticing the way light lands on my kitchen table every morning. Or the way sadness sometimes slips into laughter. The way failure, if you let it, can feel oddly tender.
Softness isn’t the opposite of strength. It’s what strength becomes when it’s no longer afraid to feel.
That’s the kind of strength I want now—not the kind that resists life, but the kind that lets it in.