Two years ago I had an accident that nearly killed me, and since then I have noticed myself softer in ways I cannot decide are good or bad. I hesitate where I used to push. I sit with people’s reasoning where I used to dismiss it. I have caught myself wondering — honestly, almost ashamed of the question — whether the person who survived that day is just a more polite version of the one who did not.
Something did change. When you come close enough to the end to feel it on your skin, you stop spending your fire on things that will not matter at the end. That is a real shift, and from the inside it can feel like weakness. The old edge — the quick yes, the quick no, the willingness to spend all of yourself on the next thing in front of you — that edge was loud. What replaced it is quieter. While I changed though the world did not and in a culture that confuses volume with strength, quiet feels like loss.
But as I learn and practice now in therapy, hold the question up to the light before you accept it. The Stoics drew a line we have mostly forgotten — the line between the things that look like virtues and the things that actually are them. Aggression looks like courage. It is not. Stubbornness looks like conviction. It is not. The person who could not be moved was not always strong; sometimes they were only afraid of being wrong. What I am calling “lost edge” might in fact be the first time in my life I am willing to be wrong in front of someone, willing to listen long enough to be changed, willing to pick the fights that matter and let the rest go. 1perhaps then, that is not the absence of strength but rather, what strength looks like when it has nothing left to prove.
Although “softness” can rot into avoidance if you are not paying attention. Guilty! There is a real version of this question, and the answer is sometimes yes. Sometimes I have called something growth that was actually capitulation. The protocol, then, is not to choose between the old self and the new one. It is to keep asking, in any given moment, which one is showing up — and why. Trust me, as my therapist would tell you, it is easier said then done.
The edge I want now is not the edge that wins arguments. It is the edge that tells the truth, holds the line on what matters, and lets the rest of it go. If that makes me a pushover in someone’s eyes, I can live with that. The person laying on the side of the road, waiting for Life Flight could not have.