as "the worst part[s] of [us] have always been trying to find their ways back to love."
- Kai Chen Thom (2021)
(Photography by Justin Anantawan - February 2020)
I say stay soft, because "colonialism broke us, and we're still figuring out how to love and be broken at the same time", and let's cry, as "we need not pretend that love was to be found in wastelands like these" (Billy-Ray Belcourt 2017)... So we grieve and grow to breathe softer - to break no further.
I don't remember exactly when I started talking about softness, but I remembered the baby steps of reclaiming my sensuality from the years of being scolded that my sensitivity was negative or weak for a "boy". And later when I was starting to introduce myself as a public speaker/artist or being asked about "what I do", I said that I'm just a storyteller searching for softness... Yet I don't think I truly felt my softness in clarity until I was fortunate to be held while surviving a panic attack after waking from night terrors, and love held me softly and asked why I was searching for softness when it was already within... So I come to slowly understand, and now I say that I'm cultivating or seeding for softness instead. As perhaps it becomes not the search but the growth of our internal understandings, groundings, and seedings of love instead... However I still cry when I wake up on some days, because "sometimes bodies don’t always feel like bodies but like wounds," (Billy-Ray Belcourt), and still I feel myself searching for softness when I don't feel whole...
I say stay soft, because I have felt suicidal since I was 12, and I am still surviving at 22. Softness has not only been a personal tool of survival but an essence/evidence of healing possibilities for me. And it has never been about giving into emotional fragility but rather to reclaim the wounds, sensitivities, or triggers from navigating violences. Softness is a feeling that has guided my un-learnings and can be emphasized as teachings of empathy-returning. It is to embrace our inner childs: to feel/rest/heal and to dream again, together...
A safer space for all is my dream, but a softer place is the plan to get there. As I have come to learn that holding space is a skill of ego-death, and that safety is a delusional luxury. The lack of safety has stolen our humanities and sanities, it becomes a violent cycle of reforming colonial spaces and socio-political systems instead of revolutionizing/decolonizing interpersonal places and connections. A softer place is an anti-capitalist call for us to put our work into relations instead, a call to lead with transformative-compassion, thus a call to seed for a blossom of return...
I say stay soft, because I have grown too exhausted to charge with anger, because I have grown too tired to call on injustice, because on some days it feels like all I have left in me is to just show up, even in tears and silence. I say stay soft, because I still get misgendered at rallies of solidarity, because I still get misheard when I speak my truths, because my oceans still get mistaken as puddles. I say stay soft, because I still cry rivers trying to walk on stolen lands... I come to understand that the violence in these soils are generations beyond my dreams of revolution/resolution, even the home island that I come from, I understand that perhaps we shall grieve forever, but maybe we can allow ourselves to start healing too... I choose softness, as I choose love, as I choose grief and ego-death.
Maybe a safer space for all doesn't live in our timeline, but I believe that we can love towards growing a softer place for all, seed by seed and moon by moon, because "I don't think we will win, [but] I don't believe hope should be a prerequisite for trying anyways" (Alok Vaid-Menon 2017). As "in here there is a garden growing in the depths i thought there was no potential for life. which goes to say i am learning that it is both possible to be honest about the reality of pain & injustice while also feeling the reality of something else. these states of being are not mutually exclusive. i am clenching my heart with one hand & reaching out for yours with the other. i am hurting [& i am ready to heal]. i am hurting [& i am ready to heal]" (ALOK 2019). And I say stay soft again, because "I am sorry that the only way we have been taught to heal is to hurt" (Alok Vaid-Menon 2017). And I believe we can heal softer, because we deserve better... Thus we rest, as "love is a moontime teaching" (Billy Ray-Belcourt 2017).