To be soft is to be strong.

 "I now believe true strength is found in vulnerability. In forgiveness. In love"
(DragonPrince)

I have become softer during the last year.
It feels weird to say.
I always was afraid to be soft, to be vulnerable and to feel.
I know that this is a result of bad experiences with love, friends and a pretty bad trauma.
Looking back at the past ten years, I see that I’ve built a very good shield and armour in trying to survive and to protect myself.
That armour has only grown harder since I was let down again and again.

The good thing with making myself harder was I could fight for myself and for my friends, I could walk 1000 miles to make justice and take down people with my words.

But it also made me very distant, it made me push people away and it made me put myself as my last priority.
I ended up carrying so many other burdens that I had no space for myself. And to not let anyone down, I grew ever harder and tried more.

Classic me.

And the realization that very few people would carry me since I was viewed as super-strong was both a surprise but also not.

I created that situation myself because I thought that the only way to protect myself was to be the strongest.
I also thought that I had to live for everyone else besides me since I had a hard time believing that I was worth anything at all (yay for years of mental abuse).

Perhaps I needed to be that person and to walk a sometimes very hard road in the past years to learn about myself.
Perhaps I needed to do that to find my own limits, what is important for me and most important, feeling stable and safe in being just...me.
This same old new me is imperfect but also very perfect. With my hardness, all the emotions, my hype and my tiredness, my super bad humour and my vulnerability, with my softness and with my honesty.

But also with learning that what matters most is me as just me and how I can never ever again put anyone before myself.

I don’t need to be the strongest and I don’t want that anymore. What matters the most is my own boundaries and needs.
If I can’t put myself first, I can’t carry anyone else without doing huge damage to myself.

Truth to be told, I don’t want to carry all of peoples worries and burdens and I don’t want to be the problem solver anymore. 

It drains me to the bone and it also does huge disfavour to the ones I solve everything for since they never learn to handle their shit.

It is very alone on that mountain of being strongest and being a fighter for others and my time on the barricades has taken its toll.

Read me right, I will always be there for my close friends and I will always fight for what I believe in. I will never stop writing about things and never stop trying to make a better world. 

But what I have learned during the pandemicridden year that was 2020 is that I value my softness and my own self a lot more.
I now put myself first.

So I’m softer, I’m more selfish and this is also me.

And how I love to rest in this feeling and to allow myself to smile, put down my guard and just live a bit more. 

To fight for myself might be the biggest adventure yet.

What has been going on?

2021 is here and before I dive into blogging again, there are some updates to be done.

Me and Svart divorced in 2019. It was my choice and something that has been on the way for a while. We parted way as friends but we have no contact today.
My life has since then centred around my work at Bethesda,( you will read more about it later) my friends and my family.
The biggest thing after the divorce has been to learn to live for myself, to be a bit more free and to form my life in a different direction.
During these two years, I have learned so much about my self, my strengths and what I need to be happy.

The other thing is that I've been working from home office since March 2020, a great privilege and that have also impacted my view of self-care and what's important in life.

These are the two main things and most likely I will write about my personal journey a bit more. Perhaps more about my work and about the sanity in a pandemic.

We’ll see!