The Terrible Reality of Being Soft

And why I'll choose it, anyway

Thanks for welcoming me into your inbox. If you’re anything like me, you have 2,460 unread emails there. It means a lot that you opened this one.

Anyway, I love having you around. I think about you. I pray for you. And I do an actual happy dance every time I get a notification that another of you has joined The Second Cup as a subscriber. I want to give a special shoutout to all you paid subscribers out there—you help make it possible to set time aside each week to write these posts, and to offer them to anyone who wants to read them. Thank. You.

If that’s something that you want to be a part of, too, join the crew! Not only will you help support these posts, you’ll get access to exclusive content, too.

---

A couple of months ago I saw a squirrel get hit by the car in front of me. 

The blessed thing would have been for it to die, but instead it limped across the road, its back legs dragging uselessly behind it. 

I can’t unsee that. Clearly—even months later—that squirrel still comes to mind. I know that it was ‘just’ a squirrel, but as I watched it happen, I was so horrified by the injustice of it all that I raised my hand to my mouth, wondering if I might lose my breakfast. I even prayed a sobbing little prayer, that the poor thing would die quickly and not have to be left defenseless in the elements for long. 

I remember thinking then, “It’s a terrible thing to have a soft heart. A beautiful thing, yes. But a terrible one. And to think: I asked for this.” 

When I left teaching a year ago, one of the reasons was that I was beginning to perceive myself growing hard. I had always said that if I ever got that way—if I could, for example, see a child crying and not feel a shred of empathy—then it was time to be done. It wasn’t the teaching that made me that way; it was more the steady compilation of disappointment and grief and exhaustion over a couple of hard years that had conditioned me for callousness. Apathy had seemed a great antidote to pain, so I’d swallowed a handful—and then I swallowed some more. 

On the day I realized I felt more exasperated than empathetic toward the child reaching out for someone to hold her, and when I later noticed that I resented the whole world around me for all of its asking and taking, I understood that my heart had become a stone. I also realized I did not recognize myself: I could not come to terms with this sculpture of a woman who, at one time in her girlhood, had tried to catch dandelions between her toes as she swooped back and forth on the swings. 

How had I gotten here? How could I get back? I wished desperately to be made soft and alive again. So as I left behind one job, I made it my new business to learn to feel again. 

And on the day of the squirrel, I knew that I had. 

We think that those who feel are the weak ones. Somehow, growing up and growing hard have been made synonymous. We attribute strength to the ones with ‘the stiff upper lips’ and the ‘hearts of steel.’ But as someone with a heart that has been both feeling and unfeeling, I can tell you right now that…