Friday Musings: You Deserve Tenderness (Patreon)

Happy Friday, y’all!

I saw this banner while walking through the River Arts District here in Asheville, and it got me thinking…how often do we offer tenderness toward ourselves? And how easy is it to receive tenderness from others?

For me, tenderness means being willing to meet ourselves exactly where we are—with an open heart. To acknowledge our imperfections, challenges, hurts, and struggles without needing to push them away, fix them, or make them mean something about who we are.

Because we do that, don’t we? Well, maybe I'm just speaking about myself here, haha.

We identify with, and sometimes cling tightly to certain stories about ourselves. You know, the “I’m not good enough” self, the “I’m an anxious person” self, or one of my personal greatest hits—the “hurt” self.

We repeat these stories so often that eventually we start beleiving them, thinking this is who we are.

But feelings change. Circumstances change. Our bodies change. Relationships change. We change. The story we’ve been carrying isn’t fixed, even when it sometimes feels that way.

And so much of the pain comes from clinging to these negative versions of ourselves, to expectations, to how we think our lives should look, how we think we should feel, or how we think other people should show up for us. We struggle against what is because somewhere inside we’ve decided it should be different.

There's a strange comfort in the familiar, even when the familiar hurts...

So my challenge to you today is this:

What would happen if you loosened your grip on the old storyline, even just a little?

What would it feel like to let go of the worry, the frustration over unmet expectations of ourselves or others, the resistance that things should be different from what they are?

Not because those feelings are wrong or need to go away. But because maybe you don’t have to cling to them so tightly or make them part of who you are.

What if you just noticed what’s here, allowed it to be here, and met yourself exactly as you are in this moment—with a little more tenderness? What would it look like to do this for yourself?

So go ahead and drop a little love and tenderness for yourself in the comments below. Share a kind word, a loving gesture, or a note to yourself that you might need to hear today.  💛