Softness Needs a Place to Land

Sunday afternoon. The kind of Sunday where you’ve finally cleared enough time to do absolutely nothing.

Candle lit. Tea going cold on the side table. The exact soft moment I write entire essays about wanting.

I pick up my phone for two minutes…

And forty-five minutes later, I’ve watched the same version of the same woman explain how a twenty-dollar supplement fixed her marriage, her metabolism, and her mother issues, all in that order.

When I put the phone down, it dawns on me.

Everything is an infomercial.

I’ve been telling my friends this for months. Get hotter. Get thinner. Get richer. Push a little harder, and get that waist-trainer, and the corner office is yours. Try the GLP-1. No shade, genuinely. That’s not the point. But the promise underneath it is that once you’re thinner, everyone will finally respect you. Somewhere in there, you’ll also find the love of your life.

We are entering a new scary world where women who used to talk about their businesses now only talk about men. The man who saved them. The dating coach teaching them how to find and keep him.

The product varies, but the sales pitch follows us into every part of our lives.

Even softness has become a performance. Buy the right sheets. Build the right morning routine. Drink the right tea. Turn your bathroom into a spa. Then, supposedly, you’ll become the kind of woman who knows how to rest.

After enough messages like that, you start treating softness like another thing you should be able to produce on demand. If you can't settle, you assume you're doing it wrong.

But sometimes softness isn’t failing to arrive.

Sometimes the conditions make it impossible for softness to land.

🕯️ In this article:

1. Three conditions that keep softness from landing

2. The reset I've been using to notice which one I'm actually in.

3. The tool that’s helped me create less noise on my phone

4. The book that’s had me in tears this month

For me, noise looks like a feed full of optimization.

Before I even have the time to decide how I feel about my body, someone is telling me how to fix it. Before I can ask what I want from my relationships, someone is explaining what men want. Before I can enjoy the life I’ve built, someone is showing me the life I should be building next.

Everything is an infomercial.

That much noise, and that much pressure to optimize every little thing, makes it difficult to hear your own thoughts. You can’t settle while you’re being sold a new reason to distrust yourself.

So as a result, I’m finding myself less polite with where my attention goes.

I mute people. I unfollow accounts that leave me feeling like a problem to solve. I put the phone in another room, even when part of me wants to pick it right back up. Not because the internet is uniquely evil, but because I know what happens when I let too many other voices speak before I hear my own.

Sometimes softness begins with fewer people having access to your nervous system.

This condition is quieter.

My calendar is full. My kitchen counter becomes a filing system for things I haven’t dealt with. There are messages I need to answer, appointments I need to make, and commitments I agreed to before asking myself whether I actually had the capacity for them.

Nothing is technically wrong. There’s simply no room.

You can light the candle and make the tea, but every part of your life is already spoken for. Your body knows it. It knows when you’re trying to squeeze rest in between a full calendar. It knows when you’re watching the clock.

Rest doesn’t happen by accident.

You have to leave something open. Say no to something you could technically fit. Clear one surface instead of reorganizing the entire house. Give yourself an hour that doesn’t need to become productive, meaningful, or useful.

That last part is difficult for me.

I know how to turn almost anything into work. I can turn a quiet Sunday into research. I can turn a walk into content. I can turn healing into another project with milestones.

Making room means allowing some part of my life to remain unclaimed.

This is a condition that’s painful to admit.

Sometimes the problem isn’t just noise or lack of space. Sometimes it’s the fact that I’ve consumed too much cruelty. Too much bad news. Too much time spent watching people humiliate each other for entertainment.

Slowly but surely, my tone begins to change.

A simple question gets interpreted as an accusation. I become fluent in sarcasm versus kindness. The very thing that last week might have rolled off my back now feels personal.

Maybe you know that feeling too. The moment you hear yourself responding and realize your voice is sharper than the moment called for. You know where it came from, even if you never say it out loud.

That’s not a judgment. It’s just something to notice.

Hardness rarely arrives all at once. It accumulates quietly. One headline. One comment section. One disappointing conversation. One more reason to believe the safest way to move through the world is with your guard already up. Until one day you realize you’ve started protecting yourself from people who never intended to harm you.

When I notice that happening, I have to ask myself: What am I doing to keep all of that from becoming the way I move through the world?

How do you stop it when the world gets too noisy, too full, or too harsh?

There probably isn’t one answer. But I’ve found it starts by noticing the condition I’m actually in.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a few minutes of EMDR-inspired bilateral audio through headphones in the morning and again at night.

The sound moves from side to side. I sit still long enough to notice what’s happening inside me. It doesn’t fix the internet, clear my calendar, or change the news. It quiets the static long enough for me to ask:

What am I consuming too much of?

What’s taking up all the room?

Where have I gone hard?

Then I try to respond to the condition I’m actually in, instead of the version of myself the world keeps trying to sell me.

Sometimes that means putting down the phone. Sometimes it means releasing a commitment. Sometimes it means apologizing for the sharpness in my voice and beginning the conversation again.

None of these choices are dramatic. Most of them wouldn’t make good content.

But they make softness more possible.

I’ve told you what I’m practicing. Now let me ask you:

Which condition are you in right now?

Is your life too noisy, too full, or too harsh?

What’s one thing you could change today to make softness more possible?

I can’t stop the world from selling me another version of myself. I can’t keep every week from becoming full. I won’t always catch myself before hardness enters my voice.

But I can become more intentional about what I allow to reach me.

Everything may be an infomercial.

My life doesn’t have to be.

I can notice sooner. I can change what’s mine to change.

I’m learning to make room for it.

Softness needs a place to land.

P.S. If this essay helped you name why softness has felt out of reach, I’d love to invite you to something that puts these ideas into practice.

On Sunday, July 26, at 7:00 p.m. ET, I’m hosting a free virtual BGB House Party for our community. We’ll gather, slow down together, make our joy jars, and spend an evening reconnecting with the small things that help us return to ourselves. No pressure to perform.

If you’ve been looking for a softer place to land, I’d love for you to join us.

Sign up for the virtual event here:

Register for the Black Girl Burnout House Party.

One of the smallest changes I made this month: I bricked my phone. Literally. Brick is a small device that blocks distracting apps until you tap your phone against it again. No willpower involved, just friction. I use it during the exact hours I used to lose to scrolling, and it’s done more for my noise problem than any screen-time app ever has.

Just finished The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff and it wrecked me in the best way. A multi-generational family saga told from alternating perspectives, opening with a house fire that changes everything. If you loved This Is Us, this is your next read. Bittersweet, beautiful, exactly what we need right now.

Wherever you land this week, noisy, full, or a little hard around the edges, I hope you find your way back to soft. See you Sunday.