Softened Until It Meant Nothing

She has said it four times now and the woman has left smiling four times.

The thing itself is not complicated and it is not cruel. It is one observation about a pattern, and it is the reason the same thing keeps happening to this woman in three different jobs, and she can see it from where she stands because she is not in it.

Here is what comes out of her mouth.

It might just be worth thinking about whether sometimes, and this could be completely off, there might be a bit of a thing about how it comes across, but honestly it could just be them.

That is a real sentence. She said something very like it in April.

The woman said oh that is interesting and they talked about a television program, and she went home and felt the thing she always feels, which is relief with something underneath it that she has never looked at.

Four times in two years. And the same thing happened again in October, and she was there for the phone call afterward.

She calls the softening kindness. It has never once occurred to her to call it anything else, and if you told her she was being unkind she would be genuinely bewildered, and she would have a point.

If your true things come out with the truth sanded off, you know exactly what I mean.

What love does to a true thing

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting a while for anybody to say it.

Softening is not automatically kindness. Sometimes it is, and knowing how much a person can take today is a real gift and this page is not taking it off you.

But a sentence with four hedges in it has not been softened. It has been dissolved, and the person on the other end has nothing to hold.

Now read the instruction, and notice which word is the verb and which is the manner.

But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.Ephesians 4:15

Speaking the truth is the action. In love is how it is carried.

Love in that verse is not a solvent. It is not the thing that reduces the truth until it is safe to hand over. It is the container: the warmth, the timing, the fact that you are for the person, the tone that makes it possible to hear.

You have both of those and they were given together, and the love was never meant to be used on the truth itself. That is not a rebuke of you. It is written in Ephesians 4:15, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

And look at what the verse says it is for. So that we may grow up. That is the purpose of the whole exercise, and a person cannot grow on a sentence with nothing in it.

So four attempts and four smiles have not been kindness. You have a true thing that was given to you to hand over intact, and carrying it warmly is a different act from thinning it. The word settled that long before April, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

What the hedges are actually doing

Here is worth being honest about, gently, because you have never once been dishonest about anything else.

Each hedge does a specific job and none of them is for her.

This could be completely off protects you from being wrong. It might just be worth thinking about protects you from having been the one who said it. And honestly it could just be them hands her a full exit, and she takes it, because who would not.

By the end of the sentence there is nothing left for her to disagree with, which means there is nothing left for her to agree with either.

I am not calling you a coward. This is the most sympathetic version of the fault there is: you have a horror of hurting somebody, and you have been managing that horror in the only way you know how, and the managing happens in the last four seconds before the sentence comes out.

But notice who has been protected. She has had the same thing happen in three jobs, and there was a phone call in October, and four times a woman who can see it clearly has stood in front of her and handed her a sentence with nothing in it.

You have permission to say it whole, and the permission does not require you to have found the perfect wording. Ephesians 4 puts love around the truth rather than through it; His Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to say a plain sentence warmly and then stop.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot say a plain thing is that somebody near you punishes you when you do, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Tell one person who can act. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.