You Were Never Meant to Go Numb

A quiet fragment from Reclaiming Softness

“Numbness is not the absence of pain.
It is the silence we learned to survive it.”

There is a kind of quiet that doesn’t soothe.
A silence that doesn’t heal.
A softness that got buried beneath the need to endure.

We’re told pain is what we must escape. But what if it’s numbness – the deep freeze of the soul – that truly keeps us from ourselves?

There is strength in becoming unfeeling.
A quiet, practiced stillness.
We learn to shrink where our emotions were unwelcome.
To harden where our softness once flowed freely.

But numbness is not peace.
It’s the pause button on a life we were meant to feel.

This reflection is drawn from Reclaiming Softness, a book born from the ache of survival and the holy tremor of beginning again.
It is not a manual for healing, but a remembering – a slow return to the self beneath the silence.

Come home, gently.
Even if you don’t have the words yet.
Even if all you can feel… is the thaw.

Thank you for sitting in this quiet with me.
May whatever softens you also guide you.
— Ashé