TGIF: Soft Strength in 2024 (Patreon)

Hello and happy Friday, patrons. How is everyone doing today? I, for one, am doing abso-fucking-lutely fantastic. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we got the news yesterday that my body has had a COMPLETE RESPONSE to the breast cancer treatment! It’s the best possible outcome we could hope for, and the reason the treatment itself was as aggressive as it was. It’s amazing news, though I’m still in a bit of shock around the whole thing. I think it’ll hit me more and more in the coming days.

I got conditioned in this process to “not expect what I expect” and to wait for the caveat or the conditions that so often accompany good news. To hear that the results were negative down the line with no additional alarms was unbelievable to say the least. I think I’m still waiting for a call that she forgot to mention something, or that she’d like me to get another biopsy of something new and suspicious. But, so far we’re in the clear. The gentle clench my body has held on to over the last six months has softened slightly. Though only slightly. Cognitively I understand and can accept the good news but my body has been fooled before in this process, so it’ll take a little time before it wholly softens.

Speaking of wholeness and softening…. I wanted to share some new found lovely sentiments as we flop, drop, glide, wriggle, spiral, float, fly, and cry our ways into 2024. On my ‘things I like’ list from a few weeks ago I mentioned the Many Moons Lunar Calendar/Planner I recently found in prep for the new year. The other day I was reading through the Lunar Overview of 2024 in the first few pages and highlighting the most resonant parts for myself. Not surprisingly I basically highlighted the entire thing. There were a lot of great notes about 2024 being an 8 year (2+0+2+4) and how that connects to strength, power, fear, overcoming, energetic refinements, flow states, building, stability, etc. Also themes around appreciating nature, spending time in nature, and tapping into our true natures. Buuuuut this is the part that I found particularly exciting. I let out an audible “ooooooohhhh” while I read it, so obviously I had to share.

“The word that will be a guide to all of us this year is soft. Soft strength, soft power. Staying soft and still precise, flexible and consistent, attracting, not pushing. This year won’t be about healing, it will be about wholeness. Wholeness as healing. As much as you can, especially with the most important projects, attempt to be whole and attempt to be soft.

2023 asked us to find our own rhythms, trade control for adaptability, and expand through movement. 2024 asks us to accept our true natures, commit to a deeper collaboration with nature, and leave our comfort zone behind.

Remember, the more that is invested into your own soft strength, your own soft power, the more resilient and kind you become. Life is about compassion, creativity, and connection. The more you can stretch toward stewardship and humility, the more your internal reserves will grow, the more love is placed in the container of your heart.”

Yes! I love this shit!!!! The idea of ‘soft power’ hit me so sweetly. I’ve found so much strength in vulnerability this year, more than I’ve ever experienced in my life. I talk a lot in these posts about being gentle with myself as it’s something I’ve never really understood how to do before this year. I never believed there was value in softening myself, my heart, my walls, or my ambition. I only knew how to be hard on myself, how to have rigid standards, and repress feelings of pride or accomplishment in the name of humility, cynicism, and apathy. If I wasn’t strict I was numb or swimming in shame and sometimes all three at once. It was endlessly uncomfortable, but SO familiar. Wholly uninspiring but habitual.

This breast cancer experience has shown me a way to be gentle with myself that I’ve never known was possible. I didn’t really have a choice but to adapt to a softer nature with myself. When it comes down to it you’d have to be a real bitch to be hard on a girl with breast cancer. So that stern, judgmental internal voice began to softened dramatically. And with that I started to feel more grounded in myself. And that grounded sense of self made it easier to share my experience without some protective layer of satire. I found a new strength in my softness. And I think there’s so much personal potential to be found in the idea of “soft strength, soft power” that I want to scream about it to everyone!!! Explore what softness means to you. Softness isn’t about minimizing or succumbing, it’s about flexibility, adaptability, nurturing, and discovering. When you soften the walls you’ve built you get to see what they’ve been hiding. What sort of treasures have you been keeping from yourself? What parts of yourself have you been suppressing?

And I think that’s what connects to the idea of “wholeness as healing”. Finding and nourishing all parts of yourself. What parts of you have you not spent time with? What feelings, thoughts, ideas, or relationships have you ignored or buried because they’re too uncomfortable to confront? It’s not something to be taken on all at once, but gently explored over time. In my experience, doing this helps you continue to discover your true nature. I do believe 2024 will be about leaving our comfort zones, which is soooooo easy to type about than to do. But, I keep reminding myself that I’ve had to endure plenty of uncomfortable things the last six months that were out of my control, now I get to choose the ways I challenge my comfort zone. We didn’t go through all of this work just to sit back and hide away from the world again. Next year I want to harness and honor my new found ‘soft power’ by confronting my creative comfort zones, committing to projects that call to me, fostering the variety of connections and community in my life, and wholly nourishing myself. I have a hard time committing to resolutions because something about them seems inherently flimsy to me. They work for plenty of people but have never really done it for me. Instead I’d like to declare some flexible goals and attempt to, as Michael Buckley so wonderfully says, “honor those commitments to myself”. We’re all about harnessing that soft strength and soft power BB!!! I’m rock hard for the softness!!!

On that note, what are your thoughts as we make our way into 2024? Any resolutions, mission statements, or soft sentiments that support the way you’d like to show up in the new year? Let me know! Sometimes writing them out can really help you clarify and commit to them. Okay, I gotta go ice the ol arm pit. It’s still swollen with some fluid post surgery. sExY, I know. Thank you all so much for facilitating such a silly and sweet space for me to post these internet diary entries every week! They’ve truly been something I look forward to and have helped me make some sense of my senseless thoughts. I hope you all have great weekends, and safe/enjoyable new years eves, whatever that looks like to you! Thanks, as always, for being here! 💚G