Soft Launch
renewable offerings of tenderness
It’s all pretty innocent at first. I mean all of it. A first idea, a first crush, a first job, first paycheck, first marriage, first pet, first heartbreak, even. I look back on a smattering of firsts with the benefit of distance and experience, (mostly) fondly.
I remember the first time I heard the phrase “soft launch,” I thought — well fuck that’s cute. A teenager on the internet explained it as being the very low stakes, low key way of introducing someone they were newly dating. It felt innocent and shy. The phrase carried with it a subtle form of hopeful vulnerability with the astute acknowledgment of fragility in a new connection. It felt realistic and idealistic all at once. The simple poetry of earnest youthful reinvention.
During my accidental hiatus from writing in this space, I have been thinking about this phrase a lot. I’ve been dating and not dating. I’ve been crying and not crying. I’ve hit new high highs with my closest friends in tow and I’ve been at the very bottom of the barrel picking up pieces I could’ve predicted would crumble. I have had violently intense crushes. I’ve had painfully mediocre crushes. I’ve had crushes which have lived solely in fantasy land. I’ve reflected on my divorce, on my most recent ending, on every person I’ve ever loved or been loved by. I’ve read books that’ve made me seethe with rage from being recognized so completely and I’ve put down two which began to teeter into the unproductive tenor of despair. I’ve rediscovered music. I’ve spent days in silence. I’ve rewatched TV that once shaped my personality, I found it discordant with the present moment. I bought new clothes, I gave things away. I worked hard and I slacked off. I started projects and abandoned some (always with the promise of returning, one day, maybe tomorrow). I’ve faced health challenges I always assumed someone would be around to hold my hand through, my community has surprised me with deep care and I’ve surprised myself. I’ve hung paintings, I’ve started new ones. I’ve created meals across from people I will keep in my life until I no longer have conscious breath. I’ve taken walks and been sunburnt and tired and confused and happy and delirious and feverish and out of breath and so utterly in progress.
I’m intensely sentimental. I can’t change. I don’t want to.
Once, a friend told me about an author she thought had no sense of self preservation. This sounded to me like a dare and a warning label. I don’t remember the author’s name or what the writing was, but this phrase stung like a needle had pierced my side.
I write from a soft place. Sometimes I write about hard things, but I get to them through the soft center of good intentions in as honest a way as makes sense to me at the time. But I doubt. I second guess. I see the cracks, the mess, the potential I can’t yet meet. Like everyone. Life and all its parts are full to the top of rewriting, editing and looking back just long enough to catapult ourselves forward. If for no other reason than we can no longer stomach being left behind.
We are so infrequently present with ourselves and others and I suspect we’re missing out on quite a lot of fun because so many things these days just seem … too hard.
When we’re faced with a full scale mountain (mental is just as valid as literal), it takes a great deal of courage to imagine ourselves on top. Even if we’ve got everything we need to get up there, even if we’re perfectly equipped, taking that first step can be such a weighted risk that it feels too dangerous to do anything other than turn around or stay still right where we are. Hello functional freeze. I’m not going to go into a vague thing about how we have to push through hard things and trust we’ll be fine on the other side of them here. I’m so bored of this rhetoric and it never helps. The world is cruel and beautiful at the same time. Something that’s beyond you today might be behind you tomorrow. Life can move at any pace at any time and we don’t have control over so much of when, where or why change occurs.
Anyone can leave us at any time. This is a fact.
They don’t need a reason, they don’t need to give you closure, they don’t even need to ever see you again or honor what was special about your connection. We get to choose how we treat people in this life and some people genuinely believe in treating themselves as the only priority in the room. It is, for better or worse, their right. And yours too. I’m not going to tell you this is a good or bad way to be. I don’t like binaries in my life and I’m not here to judge the behavior, because I can’t. I’m not equipped for that mountain.
I’m interested in a softer approach to life and to people. I’m curious about how people fall in love and stay that way. I’m curious about how they fall out of romantic love and remain extremely close friends. I’m curious about those hopeful early moments when you’re asking questions and deeply listening for the answers — I’m curious about sustainable curiosity.
In many instances in my life, I’ve been called Intense. Dramatic. Too Much. My best friend growing up once stopped mid-bite of a cosmic brownie in our middle school cafeteria to say “Mak, you are not for everyone” but quickly added, “you are definitely for me, though.” I never forgot it, and it hurt at first, but now I understand. Maybe it was her soft launching my hard to handle personality. She was trying to introduce me to myself, not from a place of judgement, but from a tender attempt at witnessing.
I’ve written about risk before. The kind of resilience it takes to put yourself out there in any capacity that registers your humanity as unique. This ranges from creative work to dating to starting a new hobby to learning to drive, asking a new friend to coffee, making a TikTok video, dancing at a wedding alone, opening a book you know might break your heart. The delicious contradiction is we are all simultaneously unique and unoriginal. Everything we’ve ever felt and thought was just our own is so inextricably connected to the collective. Even our feelings of solitude and loneliness are commonplace. It doesn’t make them any less ours to know other people are probably feeling our feelings right alongside us. Frustrating, yes, to be brought out of the trees and into the forest, but a necessary part of the full scope of life.
A soft launch is not just the tentative beginning of something new, but the reminder that every risk, every feeling, every connection is both ours alone and already shared. It’s a pulling back the curtain just enough to find relatable ground. If anything makes the forest, the mountain, the “firsts,” less overwhelming, I think it should be this purposeful choice of continued openness to whatever is next. Even if it feels like we’re waiting in the wilderness for a long time. My survival instinct has become leaning into a willingness to keep meeting each moment, each person, each version of myself with the softest possible attention.
This is an ethos at peace with the unknown but hoping for the best. A way to stay open-hearted when the world demands we be hard. It manifests in different ways for everyone and every new beginning. Their hand in your instagram stories, a tagged candid in the back of a friend’s birthday party, memorizing a whole sign birth chart and floating 8th house placement questions to your astrology nerds, adopting phrases and their cadences of speech into your own, inside jokes with callbacks over days and days, a new shared language, the precipice of something real and the sharp flip of your stomach knowing it might not last forever, but resisting the urge to bolt back into isolation. Perhaps it’s enough to know the invitation is always there: to float back, again and again, to the courage of softening.
Write in with your hardest questions and I’ll be as soft a place to land as I can for our continued curious pursuits.
xx,
