Softness as Resistance: Notes from a Helper While the World Burns

How I’m tending to myself while holding space for others

Some mornings I wake up and feel like I’ve overslept in the middle of a fire. The headlines read like a dystopian script — war, injustice, displacement, environmental grief. My chest tightens before I even get out of bed. And then I remember: I’m someone people come to for hope. For holding. For healing.

But what happens when the healer is hurting?

What does it mean to be a helper when the world feels like it’s ending?
When the air is thick with heartbreak and helplessness?
When your nervous system is already on edge before your first client walks in?

This is the part of the work we don’t always talk about.
Not the theories or interventions. Not the curated Instagram tiles or candlelit therapy rooms.
But the quiet reckoning we do between sessions.
The sobs in the car.
The full-body fatigue.
The way we wonder — privately — if we can keep doing this.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself:
How do we stay soft and awake without becoming swallowed by despair?
How do we remain witnesses to suffering without numbing out or burning up?

Here’s what I’m learning, slowly:

• We cannot metabolize the grief of the world alone.
  We need each other. Not just professionally, but intimately.
  With soup and softness. With text threads and silent eye contact. With the kind of friendship that holds you when words fall short.

• Hope isn’t a feeling. It’s a discipline.
  Some days, I practice hope like brushing my teeth — mundane, necessary, grounding.
  It’s not always magical. But it keeps me human.

• Boundaries are not barriers to compassion.
  They are the scaffolding that makes true care sustainable.
  Saying no is sometimes the most radical yes to both myself and my work.

• The world ending isn’t new.
  Ask our ancestors.
  Ask the earth.
  Collapse is part of the cycle. What feels like destruction may also be compost — the necessary decay that makes way for rebirth.

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Softness is Not Surrender

For me, the antidote to urgency — especially urgency that isn’t mine — has been softness.

I’ve been learning to slow down. To turn down the volume of “should” and turn toward what’s tender.

Softness, lately, looks like what I call slowmaxxing:
Mornings without alarms.
My boys in pajamas until 10am on a Sunday.
Coffee dates with my husband where we don’t problem-solve, we just are.
Weekends with no plans — space to let time breathe a little.

I used to equate rest with laziness. Slowness with guilt.
But now I know: slowness is sacred.

Tending to myself in these small, quiet ways isn’t indulgent — it’s maintenance.
It’s the reminder that I am not a machine for healing.
That I am allowed to rest.
That my body deserves rhythm, not performance.

And in a world that tells us to hustle harder, to always do more, to prove our worth —
choosing to slow down is an act of resistance.
It is how I reclaim my humanity.

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If you are someone who holds space for others — a therapist, a mother, a teacher, a friend — this is your reminder:

You do not have to hold it all to be good.
You are not required to save the world to make it worthy.
You are allowed to lay something down and return to it later.
You are allowed to need what you give.

We’re in a collective season of grief and reckoning. But we’re also in a season of remembering —
Remembering what it means to belong to one another.
What it means to live in a body.
What it means to care for the world and yourself, without choosing one over the other.

So if you’re tired, you’re not broken. You’re alive.
And if you’re still showing up with your heart cracked open —
That, too, is a kind of resistance.

With you,
Sahar