I’m So Sick of Being Hard

When will it feel safe to be soft?

Photo by Adryan RA on Unsplash

To begin with, gender isn’t real. It’s real the way money is real — a thing we’ve constructed as a product of human agreement. “Gendered” energies are real, in the sense of intrinsic to nature— yin and yang, really nothing more than “open, receptive energy” and “forward-moving, penetrative energy.” All bodies, like all people, contain both.

All I want to do is be soft. I want to be fully yin. I want to lay by a creek full of lilypads in my Sunday best while the sun shines and I sing “Summertime, and the living’s easy.” Ella or Lana-covering-Sublime. I want cattails running through my fingers — the plant, literal cats, either will suffice — and poetry that makes you cry. I want to cry more. I don’t want to be a cool girl. I don’t want to be a sad girl. I just want to be soft.

I’ve been pushing away my own femininity for decades in an effort to feel safe. It’s felt like a necessity for survival. I’m not sure if I mean femininity or if I mean softness — the lines feel blurred between them — but there’s some equivalent we’ve drawn in our minds between masculine and hard, between hard and strong, between strong and safe, and in order to feel safe, I’ve had to eschew being soft.

To compete, we must move forward, get ahead, penetrate. The world is built by and for the…