Softness Is a Revolution

On womanhood, survival, and the sacred rebellion of rest and tenderness. “The world has praised our strength for centuries while feeding on our exhaustion.”

They call us strong like it’s a compliment.
But what they really mean is: thank you for suffering beautifully.

They don’t want us free, they want us functional. Useful. Inspiring.
They want to marvel at our endurance without ever questioning why we’ve had to endure so much.

The world loves the image of a woman who keeps going, who mothers through heartbreak, who works through exhaustion, who smiles through pain.
We are applauded for surviving systems that were never built for us to thrive in.
Our trauma is repackaged as inspiration. Our exhaustion branded as excellence.

And when we finally collapse, they call it burnout, as if it’s an accident, not the design.

I used to think my strength was sacred.
That if I just kept showing up for my children, for my clients, for my community, I was fulfilling my purpose.
But strength became my costume, not my truth.

Behind the smile was fatigue.
Behind the prayers, grief.
Behind the healing, a quiet ache that whispered, Who’s going to hold you?

There’s a specific loneliness that lives in women who carry the world…..
an ache that comes from being everyone’s anchor and nobody’s shore.

And it’s not just me.
It’s every woman I know.
We’ve mistaken survival for self-worth.
We’ve learned to perform composure even when we’re dying inside.
We call it grace.
We call it independence.
But sometimes it’s just fear, fear that if we ever stop being strong, we’ll disappear.

The myth of the strong woman isn’t just cultural. It’s colonial.

When they enslaved our ancestors, they admired our endurance.
When they colonized our lands, they praised our productivity.
When they stole our labor, our language, and our bodies, they called it progress.

The myth was their justification, “Look how resilient she is. Look how strong she is. She can handle it.”
They mistook pain tolerance for divinity.

And centuries later, the same story plays out in boardrooms, in classrooms, in homes.
We still carry the world, only now with a smile and a LinkedIn headline.
We call it empowerment, but the empire never stopped feeding.

They turned liberation into labor, and feminism into brand strategy.

Even in modern spirituality, the exploitation continues.
Women are told to “rise in their feminine energy” while still being expected to serve, to soothe, to give.
We’re taught to manifest abundance but never to rest.
To open our hearts, but not our mouths.
To heal others, but never ourselves.

The divine feminine isn’t a hashtag.
She is Earth. She is breath. She is blood.
And She’s tired.

The oceans are her lungs. The forests her ribs.
She’s been stripped, drilled, and burned and yet still expected to give.
Just like us.

The same energy that keeps the planet spinning keeps women surviving, infinite, overextended, and undervalued.

And just like the Earth, we are told our exhaustion is beautiful.
We are called “Mother Nature,” as if nurture was never meant to be a burden.

But I’ve learned this: the Earth doesn’t rush to bloom. She rests. She sheds. She begins again.
Maybe we should too.

Then there’s love, the quiet battlefield.

In this modern age of dating apps and “no strings attached,” even intimacy has become a transaction.
They call it liberation, but it feels more like hunger.
A generation starved for connection, calling it freedom because we were told wanting more makes us needy.

We’ve been taught that empowerment means detachment.
That to want softness, consistency, or devotion makes us weak.
That our worth is tied to how little we need, how much we give, and how gracefully we pretend not to care.

We perform chill like survival.
We hand out pieces of our hearts like communion, praying that one day someone might stay to worship instead of consume.

And when they leave, we blame ourselves for being “too much.”
When really, we’ve just been loving in a world allergic to depth.

Even in love, we are expected to hold space for men who fear their own reflection.
To mother them emotionally.
To absorb their projections.
To be healer, lover, therapist, and muse, all while never asking to be held.

But love that drains you is not love.
It’s labor disguised as connection.
And in a world that profits from women’s depletion, that confusion is by design.

Softness, then, becomes rebellion.
To rest is to resist.
To feel is to fight.
To slow down is to defy an empire that measures your worth by your productivity.

We have marched, built, bled, and borne entire generations into existence.
Now, the revolution asks us to be still, to return to what is sacred: breath, body, soil, silence.

Softness is the power they can’t quantify.
It is the whisper that interrupts the war.
It is the reminder that divinity was never loud, it was always living in the quiet spaces between heartbeats.

When a woman chooses softness, she is choosing to remember.
She is choosing to live outside of usefulness.
She is choosing to believe that her body, her love, her rest are holy.

And when enough of us remember……the world will have no choice but to change.

I think often about the mothers who came before us.
My great-grandmother in Harlem, known for her healing hands and her prayers to the spirits.
The women who survived on intuition and song when there was no therapy, no language, no permission.
The women who burned incense in silence, who hid their magic in Sunday clothes, who passed down their softness in recipes and lullabies.

They were the first revolutionaries.
Their love was unrecorded, but it changed everything.

And I wonder, what will our generation pass down?
Will our daughters inherit our exhaustion or our peace?
Will they learn that softness is their birthright, not a luxury?

Because I want mine to know that being gentle doesn’t make them less powerful, it makes them untouchable.
That God lives in their rest just as much as in their ambition.
That their softness can move mountains because it already moved me.

The Mother Wound isn’t just the absence of love, it’s the addiction to struggle.
And we are the generation healing it, one boundary, one breath, one moment of rest at a time.

The revolution won’t be televised, because it’s happening inside of us.
In our decision to breathe deeper, to care slower, to stop apologizing for needing time.
It’s happening when we refuse to explain our intuition.
When we pray without fear of being called witch.
When we choose ourselves without guilt.

May we remember that being soft does not mean being small.
May we honor our bodies as altars, our hearts as temples, and our rest as worship.
May we find the courage to slow down in a world addicted to speed.
May we raise our children ( and ourselves ), with gentleness, not guilt.
May we speak truth softly, but never silently.

And when they call us strong, may we smile and whisper,

“No, I’m free.”