How to Stay Soft Without Falling Apart
There are days where the weight of it all feels cellular. Where cruelty isn't just a headline; it’s a texture in the air, a tightness in your gut, an invisible hand clenching your throat while the rest of the world carries on like it's not happening.
We’ve woken up the past few mornings to the sound of distant violence. Not literally, but the shape of war was there in the news, in the nervous silence of neighbours, in the way the earth seemed to be holding its breath again.
And still, somewhere deeper, I could feel it. That ache to stay soft. That longing not to be turned to stone by the sheer volume of devastation. The resistance of not letting this world harden me.
We're told, explicitly or not, that to survive this era we have to grow callouses on our souls. That the way to navigate cruelty is to steel ourselves, shut it out, don the armour of indifference and carry on.
But that’s not resilience. That’s numbing. That’s trauma behaving like wisdom.
Real resilience isn’t about being untouched; it’s about staying permeable without being undone. It’s the nervous system that can return to baseline. It’s the heart that can break and keep loving. It’s the refusal to let the worst thing become the only thing.
That’s not softness as fragility. That’s softness as skill.
Your Nervous System Is Not a Machine
In a world that punishes sensitivity, we often internalize the idea that our reactions are flaws. But your body’s response to cruelty is not weakness. It’s accuracy.
What the world calls ‘overreacting’ is often a finely-tuned survival system doing its job under unnatural conditions.
Your autonomic nervous system functions across three broad states: Ventral vagal (regulated and connected), sympathetic (mobilised fight or flight), and dorsal vagal (shutdown or freeze). These are all intelligent responses to perceived safety or threat.
When you’re scrolling through death tolls and watching political systems rupture, it makes sense to shift into sympathetic drive. Your heart races. Your breath shortens. You feel the need to do something. If that sympathetic surge doesn’t find an outlet, your body may swing into dorsal collapse: Numbness, disconnection, fatigue, despair. This is your system trying to protect you from overwhelm, but it can leave you feeling disoriented or lifeless.
And here's where softness becomes a skilled intervention.
The act of bringing your system back into ventral regulation through touch, breath, rhythm, or connection is not frivolous. It’s biochemical resistance. It restores your capacity to perceive nuance, connect to others, and take meaningful action. It lets you respond rather than react.
Some of the most effective nervous system regulation tools are deceptively simple:
Longer exhales than inhales calm the vagus nerve and shift the body into parasympathetic regulation.
Gentle rhythmic movement, like rocking, walking, or swaying, mirrors the early developmental patterns that first taught our bodies safety.
Eye-gazing or being seen by another human face in calm connection resets our social engagement system.
Orienting, consciously turning your head and scanning your environment, reminds your body that it is here and not in a threat loop.
Touching texture (stone, cloth, bark) or placing your hand on your sternum or belly sends signals of containment and grounding.
These practices don’t fix the world. But they stabilize the vessel through which we meet it. They widen your window of tolerance so you can stay present without dissociating, exploding, or imploding.
When softness is understood through the lens of nervous system health, it becomes clear: this isn’t passivity. This is a form of strategic re-regulation. A returning to baseline so we can navigate crisis without abandoning ourselves.
To be soft in a time of collapse is to say:
“I refuse to let trauma shape my whole perception of what’s possible.”
“I will not forfeit my capacity for joy, grief, nuance, or kinship.”
“I can witness horror without dissolving into it.”
Softness, in this context, is not collapse, it’s compost. It metabolizes pain, stores wisdom in the tissues, and lets us keep growing toward one another when every system teaches us to isolate or numb.
You are not broken for needing regulation. You are biological, ancestral, and brilliant. And your body is doing its best to carry you through a world that was never meant to be endured alone.
The Ritual of Return
I believe in rituals. Not because they’re pretty or poetic, but because they create interruptions in the spiral of collapse.
Every day, I return to practices that remind my body it is not alone. That time is cyclical. That grief is holy. That I am not the first to live through something unspeakable.
Some of mine:
A cup of tea brewed slowly, hands on the mug like an anchor.
Lighting a candle for those I’ve lost and those I’m afraid to lose.
Touching the soil with bare hands before reading the news.
Singing to my dead, because silence cannot have the final word.
None of this protects me from the pain. But it keeps me located within it. It keeps the pain from erasing me. Staying soft doesn’t mean saying yes to everything. It means learning where your “no” is sacred. You can close the door and still love the world. You can limit your exposure to people who leak violence. You can unfollow, unhook, unplug.
Boundaries aren’t walls; they’re irrigation lines. They help direct the flow of energy toward what you actually want to nourish. If you want to keep your heart open, you’ll need to protect the soil it grows in.
Ancestral Continuity
I come from people who prayed in secret. Who whispered healing songs under coloniser flags. Who buried the dead with salt and song when there were no maps left. They didn’t stay soft because it was easy. They stayed soft because it was necessary. Because it was what kept the future reachable.
When I feel myself about to break apart under the weight of the world, I remind myself: Someone survived so you could feel this much.
So I grieve, deliberately. I touch my heart and ask it what it needs. I let the tears come without making a performance of them. I don’t always have answers. But I know how to keep showing up.
That’s what softness is. Not a lack of spine. But the presence of spirit. The choice to feel and love and tend and care even when it hurts to stay open.
You Are Not Weak for Feeling
If you are finding yourself weeping in the dark, if the state of the world is pressing against your ribs and you feel like you’re breaking, this is not failure. This is your aliveness refusing to be anesthetized.
Stay with that.
Build your capacity around it. Root yourself in ritual, in lineage, in body. Create containers where your grief can metabolize into insight. Let your softness teach you what endurance looks like.
Because softness isn’t the opposite of strength. Softness is what survives.