Someone told me once, early in a work environment i had just entered, to stop being so approachable. Said it in a way that suggested approachability was a strategic mistake. That people would take advantage of it and not take me seriously if i did not perform a certain kind of hardness.
I understood what they were saying. I had seen it play out for other people. But i also noticed something about the person giving that advice. They had built walls that kept them safe and also kept them alone in a way they pretended was a choice.
Kindness gets confused with weakness by people who have decided that softness is a liability. Usually people who got hurt being soft at some point and drew the wrong conclusion. The conclusion that the softness was the problem rather than the specific situation or person that punished it.
But kindness as a sustained way of moving through the world is not weakness. It requires more discipline than harshness does. Harshness is often just reactivity. Closing off. Protecting yourself at the expense of connection. Kindness is the thing you choose deliberately in moments when a harder response would be easier and more immediately satisfying.
I have met people in my life i would describe as genuinely kind. Not soft in a pushover sense. Not people without limits or without the ability to say no. But people who default to warmth and generosity in how they treat others, who give benefit of the doubt without being naive about it.
Those people are not weak. They are some of the strongest people i know. Because they maintained something in environments that kept trying to convince them it was a liability.
The world needs less performed hardness. Most of it is armour over old wounds pretending to be character.
Be kind. Not because it is always easy. Because it is actually who you want to be underneath everything else.
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