Softness Doesn't Need Permission to Be Strength

I was at a red light on Sunset yesterday when a song came through the speakers I hadn't heard in years. Something from the early 2000s—R&B, tender in that specific way that genre used to allow itself to be before everything got slick and distant. The kind of song where a man admits he's confused, that he doesn't know what to do next, that he needs someone and isn't ashamed to say it out loud.

I felt something shift in my chest. Not nostalgia. Recognition.

Because I grew up in a Brooklyn that didn't make space for that kind of admission. You could feel things—everyone felt things—but naming them out loud, letting them live in your voice without immediately covering them with a joke or redirecting to something safer, that was a different currency. That cost you something.

I've been sitting with this lately. The specific violence of being told your softness is a problem. That tenderness—real tenderness, the kind that doesn't perform or posture but just exists as your default temperature—is something you're supposed to grow out of.

I didn't grow out of it.

I tried. I spent years in my twenties convinced that the right version of myself was harder, more guarded, less available. I watched men around me operate from distance and call it strength. I tried on that armor and it never fit right. It felt like lying. Like cosplay.

What I didn't understand then—what I'm only now starting to hold clearly—is that the tenderness wasn't the problem. The expectation that I erase it was.

I keep thinking about something Audre Lorde said: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." She was talking about Black women's survival, but the principle holds. Because staying soft in a world designed to harden you—choosing care when coldness would be easier, choosing presence when distance would be safer—that's its own kind of resistance.

The work I built into the sessions—what I'm calling the Frequency in my own language now—is about this exactly. About locating the specific pitch you operate at naturally and learning to stay there even when the room is asking you to modulate. Not because modulation is always wrong, but because too many of us have been modulating so long we've forgotten what our natural register even sounds like.

I lost years to that forgetting.

And here's what I'm sitting with now: the literary landscape is finally catching up to what some of us have been feeling for a long time. The fiction coming out of the 2020s from Black men—what's getting published, what's getting read, what's landing with people—isn't the hard-boiled masculinity of earlier decades. It's not the street lit that had to perform a certain kind of toughness to justify its existence.

It's quieter than that. More interior. More willing to sit with confusion and ambivalence and the specific ache of wanting something you don't know how to ask for.

Percival Everett has been doing this for decades—writing Black men who are complex and contradictory and tender in ways that don't announce themselves as radical but are. Rivers Solomon's work sits in that same lineage, queering Blackness and masculinity in ways that make space for all the textures we've been flattening. Paul Beatty lets his characters be absurd and broken and still deserving of care.

This isn't new. It's just finally being allowed to breathe.

What's shifting—what I feel shifting in real time—is permission. Not from the world. From us. The permission to write ourselves as we actually are instead of as we've been told we should be. To admit we're scared sometimes. That we don't have all the answers. That we've been hurt in ways we're still learning how to name.

That the softness isn't weakness. It's just honest.

I think about the narrator in Loverboy, Still—a man who keeps loving even when love has cost him almost everything. He doesn't harden. He doesn't close off. He stays open in ways that feel almost reckless. That's not because he's naive. It's because he understands something about himself that took me thirty years to learn: that staying tender doesn't make you fragile. It makes you deliberate.

I'm not there yet. I don't know if I ever fully get there. But I know this: I'm done apologizing for the parts of me that feel deeply. For the instinct to reach first, to care without guarantees, to let people see me before I've figured out how to package myself safely.

The red light turned green. The song ended. I sat there for a second anyway, holding the feeling before it could dissipate into the rest of the day.

This is the work for the rest of the year. Maybe longer.

If you're sitting with something similar—if you've been trying to harden yourself into something more acceptable and it's costing you more than you want to admit—the work that built this clarity in me is at the Gregory Mitchell Experience.