Strength

Strength. The truth is I can be tough and inauthentic if I need to be.

I just don’t want to be.

I want to be soft, tender, gentle, and compassionate in my world because it is authentic to who I am, to being a dreamer like me. Realistically, I may not be able to carry this sensitivity and softness off in all ways, all the time, in all the world quite yet, but I can be the cottony me here, inside my home, inside the safe, gentle sanctuary of home. Inside of my little circle of life and peeps.

Mask off in here.

I may be rugged and resilient, but I don’t want to wear combat boots anymore. They just don’t fit. I don’t want to be in the power struggle with the world because someone expects me to be stalwart and hardy. I long for tenderness. So much. The world has become a very harsh place to be a sensitive, loving empath. It’s exhausting.

But… I have learned that it takes a great deal of strength, courage, and temerity to be sensitive and generous. Well-meaning mentors have told me to wear the mask of callous, unemotional imperviousness. To be unshakable and unbreakable in order to survive this.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not unbreakable. And I don’t want to be. I want to be able to feel all the heartache, as well as all the joy. Emotions are a spectrum. I want to be vulnerable and squishy. That’s who I am at the core.

I wonder… who were you before they told you?

When a portal opens to leave behind an old script, an old definition, identity, and way of being in the world, it’s bound to meet resistance. From both within and without. Because there will always be someone else’s script on your desk, demanding to be read.

I am putting my old script on notice. And bringing the authentic, gentle, childlike me back to life, breathing life into her, with the breath of heaven. I have decided to live like a believer, in me the dreamer, and in my gifts. There is strength in my sensitive nature. I am handing that old script about being tough and callous back. My life, my choice. I choose the role I play.

Who is with me?

The tonic, distilled to three simple things for today: I’m handing that script back. My life, my choice of what strength means to me. I choose the role I play.