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Some Advice for Soft People:

Diane Aoki
2 min readOct 2, 2019

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You can use your softness to become more powerful

Proof that I am a softie. My daughter’s old doll by my bedside.

I know I have a soft touch. More than once, I have not pushed hard enough to open something, or move something, and needed to ask for help. And someone else (male or female) seemed to do it easily. We joke about how I loosened it up, but I know it’s something else. This is me. It came to a full-fledged awareness yesterday at the airport when I tried to scan my boarding pass into the ticket scanner. When the agent saw my struggle, he did it just like that (finger snap). He was even kind of nerdy. I noticed he had put a little force in it, where I kind of just let it float under the scanner. “Oh you need force,” I said. He laughed.

I realized in that moment that I had done this on many occasions in my life. I am too cautious. I walk through life not wanting to break things. I like being a softie, a pacifist, the opposite of a drama queen. I am a cool cookie. I have been complimented for my patience. In fact, I recently wrote a note to myself that “Patience is my Superpower.”

Like anything, there is a shadow aspect to this. Because I’m patient, I don’t fight for anything. Because I’m mellow, I don’t have a fire in my belly to even set goals, much less achieve them. Because I’m a softie, I waste time by taking too long to do something that could be done faster with more force.

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Diane Aoki
Diane Aoki

Written by Diane Aoki

Playwright, essayist, teacher, artist, songwriter, poet. Creativity Activist.

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