Today’s accompanying tune: “Both Sides, Now” by Joni Mitchell
Hardy.
That’s how most people tend to describe anything that manages to survive in the desert — plants, animals, buildings, people. The lack of water, harsh temperatures, and generally hostile environment harden those that call it home so that they may make it through another day. It is an unforgiving place, they say, one where the smallest soft spot is a weakness.
In a way, those people aren’t wrong. The plants are spiky, deterrents formed to protect their water stashes just below their skins, or grow hardened bark where the sun hits them hardest to avoid any additional evaporation. The animals live underground, where temperatures are more reasonable, or venture out only after the harsh sun has set. Many have scales instead of fur, fangs instead of molars. The low-slung buildings are painted light colors to prevent heat retention and covered in wind-resistant but rough stucco instead of vinyl siding. Even the heaviest, sturdiest metal outdoor furniture is tied down so it doesn’t blow away. The people, well, we adapt in our own unique ways. Our skin grows accustomed to the heat, we drink as much water as humanly possible plus a little bit more. We add hats and light layers in durable fabrics, we drive light-colored cars. We learn to live without some of the modern conveniences so that we can call this place home.
A lot of people see hardy as a positive descriptor, a quality to be admired. To be hardy is to have been hardened, over time, by forces bigger than oneself. To adapt to less-than-ideal conditions without losing too much of oneself in the process. As a culture, we value hardiness, the ability to withstand the hardness of our environment and survive, if not thrive. It taps into the uniquely American ideal of the individual. I am hardy, and therefore I can survive. What that ignores, however, is the feeling that comes before hardiness — you have to suffer to come out hardy on the other side. You have to lose some water to evaporation, overheat, adjust, try again. And in suffering, we admit our weaknesses, our soft spots. Those spots that have yet to harden.
It’s no surprise people like to skip that part of the hardiness journey. We aren’t always comfortable with softness, with the vulnerability it implies. It can feel like weakness, something in the process of hardening but not quite there.
This is where I admit that I’m a crier. I cry at everything, because of everything. My softness is a perpetual flow of tears, whether I am angry or frustrated or so happy that it turns to sadness because I know it is only fleeting. I cry at commercials, live music, the way the sun hits the mountains in the morning. It’s a painfully visible softness, my eyes red and puffy for hours after I’ve stemmed the flow and snot dripping down my face. It’s not a pretty vulnerability, not like the way soft flowers bloom from the cacti after it rains. It’s the wrinkled leaves unfurling in the spring, not yet green and lush, maybe still a little sick looking, but unmistakably there nonetheless. There was no hiding that I had a soft spot, one easily poked until it gave way. I spent most of my life trying to figure out how to harden it, how to paper over the soft spot so that it couldn’t be exploited. I cried in bathrooms at work, took a lap around the block, meditated, pinched the skin on my hand. I ran and hiked and joked, determined to stop the flow before it had even started. I could feel it coming, the burn at the bottom of my eyes giving mere minutes’ warning to change course before it would overflow, the warmth around my tongue announcing that a deluge was imminent.
I saw my softness as weakness, proof I wasn’t strong enough to handle what was being thrown my way, a sentiment only more ingrained by my “I’ll give you something to cry about” Midwestern upbringing. Softness was punished, ridiculed, in the name of toughening up. Of hardening. And when any emotion, any at all, brings on the tears, well, you learn to kick them to the curb.
I became hardy. I adapted to the harsh environments of both my upbringing and, later, the corporate world. Softies need not apply. Vulnerabilities checked at the door. I became bitter, sarcastic, caustic. I was funny, a good time but never a serious time. I worked hard and didn’t talk much. I compared myself to the late Matthew Perry’s character Chandler on Friends, one that never cried but could never be the butt of his endless jokes because he was the one making them. I chose to suffer, believing it would convert to hardiness, to a thicker skin. It would make me tough, someone good. That to be tough was to be morally superior, in a way. Stronger than those around me. Able to withstand anything that tore others down.
I never really hardened, though, not really. The exterior, maybe, but never the interior. My bark had come, but the soft tissue inside still pulsed with vulnerability. The spikes protected my reserves, the tears that never fell expanding underneath my skin. The fangs a defense against the underbelly that remained white against the sand.
As I contemplated quitting my job, a whole host of other life shifts were happening, ones that forced my to confront my soft spots, the ones that never hardened. I started crying on runs, unable to stop them from coming. I cried on hikes. I fell asleep listening to folklore. I asked my therapist if I seemed depressed.
“A lot of people, when they’re depressed, don’t feel anything. You’re feeling it all,”
she said. (Side note: therapy is great and should be more accessible to everyone who ever wants to try it, full stop.)
Things changed a lot once I started allowing myself to feel it all instead of fighting to keep it down. What good had it done, really, to close myself off, to make myself hard and bitter? I didn’t want to be hard, to be hardy. I wanted to be soft, because the soft parts are what makes everything alive. We protect the soft parts so that we can continue living, continue day after day even in the harshest places. The soft parts are part of everything — the Joshua tree’s core, the coyote’s den. The wildflowers that appear seemingly out of nowhere every spring and again in late summer, if we are lucky. If the world allows, we can show off our soft spots, the small moments of absolute beauty emerging from the hardiest beings. We can feel joy without guilt. We can be resilient instead of hardy. We can endure with appreciation instead of feelings of moral superiority.
I still run and hike, something others would classify as “type 2 fun.” Type 2 fun is suffering in the moment but coming out the other side euphoric, accomplished, delighted. So delighted. It’s not about earning the feeling, though I’m sure some people do feel that way. For me, it just enhances the accomplishment, the euphoria, the delight. I am more open, softer, at the end of it. I am emotional and messy and vulnerable. I can let my guard down, practice being a softer person even when I know it opens me up to more criticism, more pain, more rejection. And the more I practice that, the better I get. I can appreciate the light breeze on a warm run, the chill of an alpine start. The sleep deprivation and hunger and blisters. They remind me to be alive, the softness of my humanity edging ever closer to the surface with each step.
With softness comes openness. When I am soft, I am open to happiness, to joy, to new delights. When I feel my softness intensely, it is hard to imagine any other way of being. Being hard is being closed off, stuck in a plastic case watching the world from inside. The world becomes only that which you can feel from inside the case, so small that there is barely air enough to breath. The experience of living grows the softer I have become.
The world is hard enough as it is. If you need proof that softness is in even the harshest conditions, you only have to walk out into the desert and look. Look at the trail of quail chicks following the leader. Look at the juniper berries ripening on the green bush. Look at the small black dots of the cryptobiotic soil, so soft that a single step will kill it.
We’re hard because we have to be, because sometimes our environments are harsh, and to survive we need to adapt. But we can still choose to be soft, to feel our humanity and show it off even when we’ve learned only the hard ways. To embrace our harsh environments, but bloom whenever we get the chance. The beauty in that choice is enough to make me cry.
Here’s to feeling it all, inside and out.
- Megan
So beautifully written my friend. Thank you for sharing all of you,
Love this so much!! Yes to openness and vulnerability. That's true strength.