Soft Is the Bravest Thing I’ve Got

We love a clean ending. We crave it; closure. That final conversation. The perfectly framed goodbye.

But here’s the thing: some things don’t end cleanly. Some things don’t end at all. And trying to force closure where it doesn’t belong is its own form of self-betrayal.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to close doors that were never mine to close. Conversations that never happened. Apologies that never came. Questions that floated unanswered, then just… stopped echoing. I used to treat those moments like they were waiting for me to solve them. But they weren’t puzzles. They were wounds that didn’t need solving. They needed time. Or maybe they just needed to be left alone.

We’re taught that strength means pushing through. Surviving. Powering on. And look, I get it. Sometimes we have no choice. But eventually, endurance becomes identity. You don’t even notice it happening. You’re complimented for your resilience, your toughness, your ability to bounce back. And so you keep doing it. Bouncing. Burying. Showing up with your game face. You get good at being "strong."

But what this really means is: you get good at pretending you're fine.

And no one checks in anymore.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped wanting to be strong. I started wanting to be soft. I wanted to say, “That really hurt,” and not follow it up with a joke or a silver lining. I wanted to be disappointed without turning it into a lesson. I wanted to grieve without needing it to make me wiser. And I wanted to stop tying every loose thread in my life into a neat little bow.

Let’s be honest: some situations are too messy to fix. Some people will never give you the answers you’re looking for. Some stories don’t wrap up, they just stop showing up in your life, until one day you realise you’re not carrying them around as much. And maybe that’s enough.

There’s a psychological term that’s stuck with me: ambiguous loss. Coined by Dr. Pauline Boss, it describes grief that doesn’t follow the typical rules. The kind you feel when someone’s gone, but not really, like a parent with dementia, or someone you loved who vanished emotionally long before they left physically. There’s no closure in ambiguous loss. There’s just… the loss. The ambiguity.

It turns out, a lot of life is like that.

Friendships that fizzle. Jobs you loved that ended badly. Relationships where you never got to say what you needed to say. Not because you didn’t want to, but because the other person couldn’t (or wouldn’t) meet you halfway. And sometimes, healing isn’t about confronting. It’s about accepting that you won’t get that final scene. And learning to live well anyway.

We also need to talk about the damage done by glorifying "healing" as a straight line. The idea that once you “do the work,” you’ll reach some stable state of evolved calm. You’ll be whole, composed, fully processed.

But healing doesn’t always feel like healing. It feels like rawness. Like confusion. Like stepping back into old patterns even when you know better. It’s not linear, and it’s definitely not pretty.

There’s solid research showing that forcing meaning too soon after a painful experience can actually delay real recovery. In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people who tried to make sense of trauma too quickly were more likely to experience prolonged distress. Sometimes, we need space before we can shape the story. Sometimes, there isn’t a story yet.

So here’s what I’m learning to live with:

• Some people won’t say sorry.

• Some endings will feel more like disappearances.

• Some grief won’t offer insight, just presence.

• And some parts of me will never be fully over it.

But maybe being soft means allowing all of that. Not fighting to make everything tidy. Not turning every experience into a performance of strength. But instead, saying: this is still open, and I’m still okay.

Because being okay doesn’t mean being finished. It means being honest. It means learning to sit in the unresolved without letting it own you.

And if that doesn’t look like the strength we’ve been sold, maybe it’s because we’ve been buying the wrong definition.

If this stirred something in you, let it sit. No need to force a conclusion.

‘Till next time…