The Price of Softness

The Price of Softness

By [waseem khan]

They always called her soft.

As if softness were a flaw. As if her ability to hold space, to listen, to carry the weight of silence, was anything less than power.

“You’re too sensitive,” they told her, when she flinched at sharp words.

“You’re too emotional,” they muttered, when her eyes welled up at a stranger’s pain.

“You overreact,” they warned, when she dared to name cruelty for what it was.

She learned, slowly and quietly, how to tuck her reactions into the corners of her chest like broken glass wrapped in silk.

From a young age, she was taught to be the bigger person.

When the boy pushed her on the playground, they didn’t ask why. They asked her to forgive.

When her friend made a joke at her expense, the adults laughed louder than she did. “She didn’t mean it,” they said.

When she came home in tears because someone called her a name, her mother said, “Don’t let them get to you.”

So she didn’t.

She let it all live inside her instead.

She stacked every hurt, every bruise, every biting word into a tower only she could see. And when it wobbled, when the foundation cracked, she told herself to smile. To breathe. To rise.

Because strong women don’t cry.

Kind women don’t complain.

Soft women must be saints.

She learned how to apologize for things that weren’t her fault.

How to make herself smaller in conversations.

How to say “it’s okay” even when it wasn’t.

How to carry the emotions of others like shopping bags with snapped handles—still trying to hold on, even as they cut into her skin.

She mastered the art of being fine.

Not good. Not joyful.

Just… fine.

But beneath the surface, something was splintering.

Kindness, she learned, is not the same as passivity.

Softness does not mean surrender.

And grace does not mean she has to keep bleeding so others don’t feel uncomfortable.

There is a cost to always being the bigger person.

A quiet tax on the soul.

It meant staying silent in boardrooms where her ideas were repackaged in deeper voices.

It meant saying “I understand” when her partner shut down mid-argument.

It meant smiling when someone spoke over her.

Again.

And again.

And again.

It meant clenching her fists under the table while saying, “Don’t worry about it.”

Because being gentle was expected. And expected. And expected.

Until it emptied her.

One day, standing in the mirror, she didn’t recognize herself.

Not because her face had changed—but because her eyes had grown tired of absorbing every blow, of dulling every bright thing inside her to stay likable.

So she made a decision.

She decided softness didn’t mean swallowing fire.

That her tears weren’t weaknesses, but weather—an emotional forecast that warned when the air turned cold and careless.

She stopped apologizing for her feelings.

Stopped cushioning her opinions with disclaimers.

Stopped offering her peace to people who handed her pain.

She began saying “no.”

Not loudly. Not cruelly.

Just with enough clarity to feel the earth shift beneath her feet.

There were people who didn’t like this new version of her.

The ones who only loved her when she was pliable. Predictable. Quiet.

They called her bitter now.

Difficult.

Dramatic.

They asked what happened to the sweet girl they used to know.

She smiled.

She didn’t disappear. She just stopped bleeding for people who never brought bandages.

She hadn’t hardened.

She’d simply learned to protect her softness from those who mistook it for permission.

Because there’s power in gentleness.

There’s strength in empathy.

And there’s a wild, defiant kind of courage in staying tender in a world that rewards cruelty.

She is still soft.

But no longer silent.

And that is her revolution.

Word count: ~760 words

Would you like an image prompt or picture idea to visually represent this story?

Ask ChatGPT