Hey, everyone! This is Ellie. I saw the above post come up on my Facebook timeline while I was listening to our favorite chill band, the War on Drugs, and immediately knew that I had to write about it here. I’m just gonna be straight up with you all – we often feel like we are not gentle enough in a world that often calls for more gentleness and tact than we often feel we can muster. Eight wrote a while ago about his Enneagram personality type, the Type Eight, and I, like many in my system, resonate a lot with what he had to say there. We’re a system of predominantly very guarded, very private people, armed and defended to the teeth with anything that will keep prying eyes out. And yet, conversely, we have a very protective side and would do anything within our power to keep the people we love safe and happy. This came from a lot of violent trauma we had to define ourselves in spite of. It did indeed take a lot of violence to become this fucking gentle.

An Idiosyncratic Path Toward Gentleness

I was talking with my husband, Emerson, today about how we’ve known from a very young age who we were, what we stood for, and what we wouldn’t tolerate in our life as soon as we could help it. One of our earliest memories is of our childhood host, Castor, sitting in his car seat very consciously and deliberately defining what would become the system’s incredibly staunchly held moral code. He must have been no older than four. Emerson said that most people don’t define themselves to that degree until they’re in their mid thirties like him, and that was yet another thing that set us apart from our peers and made us feel incredibly lonely.

Our very controlling mother, Hera, didn’t like that we knew ourselves so well and held so firmly to ourselves and our beliefs. She wanted us to be normal and went to great lengths to try and make us into her definition of normal, which was very skewed. We refused to budge, which only made her hurt us worse. We were never going to give up the fight so long as she refused to leave us to our own devices like we had been asking her to from an early age, pain and punishments and trauma be damned.

A Masterclass In What Not To Do

We were never going to be normal and we didn’t care by the time we were twelve if that realization destroyed her. She was a masterclass in everything we didn’t want out of life and everything we didn’t want to become. So we simply didn’t. Instead, we did our best to be genuinely kind, gentle, and loving, while still holding firm boundaries and not taking any bullshit. We never wanted anyone to experience what she had done to us at our hand, so we decided in our teens that enough was enough. We were going to be as kind as situations would allow us to be, godsdamnit.

Money, power, and prestige were everything to her, and she often confused financially supporting us for loving us while being incredibly cold and cruel otherwise. So we decided to never accept that treatment or provide it. If we gave someone something, it was going to be of our own volition, not because there were invisible strings attached. Hera will never know the violence that caused this gentleness because she’s still wrapped in the invisible strings that came with her gifts and support. Gifts don’t come with strings. Traps do. So we left her in Texas to drown, weighed down by her own shame and inner pain as soon as we could.

What We Really Wanted To Be

We discovered the sort of people we did want to be almost by accident. We decided to try and sincerely compliment strangers sincerely to see what happened. It started slowly – and embarrassed the hell out of Hera, so we kept going. By the time we were well situated in the Mormon Church at fourteen, we had hundreds of friends we’d made simply by breaking the ice with a genuine compliment about their outfit.

This evolved further and we found that we could find common ground with nearly anyone as long as they weren’t going out of their way to be a bigot due to a wealth of knowledge we had spent years collecting. That is what we wanted to be. Not the cold, selfish bitch that Hera was. Not the angry, cornered animal she wanted us to be. We were never going to cause the sort of pain that had been done to us if we could at all help it. We were going to be gentleness and love. It took a long time to learn how to do it well, and we keep trying to be a little better every day.

There are still times where gentleness doesn’t come in handy and we have to bring the angry, wounded animal within us forward, but mercifully those times are becoming fewer and farther between. Building a life we love filled with people we trust enough to allow us to drop our guard has helped immensely in that. It’s taken years of work, but we’re finally getting there.

A Mission Statement, Of Sorts

All of this work has led us to the conclusion that if you aren’t going out of your way to be an asshole or a bigot, you’re welcome in our life and we’ll be kind and gentle to you accordingly to the best of our ability. Bad days happen and we try and communicate through them so we can forgive and move past them. We don’t care what sort of life or background you came from. We’re not gonna judge you for that shit. If you are doing your best to heal and grow and be a better person than you were yesterday, you’re welcome in any space we make. Gentleness, like love, is a practice, one we try to work on every day.

Final Thoughts

Hurt people may hurt people, but hurt people can also help people if they decide they want to heal. I hope this helped you feel less alone at the very least. As always, stay tuned for more magic!

Your Faithful Super-Admin,

Ellie