I love the word tender so much.
I love how it rolls off the tongue, (*Come on! try it* teeeeeeenderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr).
I love how when I say it, it leaves my mouth feeling all soft and sweet.
It’s truly a word that is felt when spoken, that invites us to embody it, to live in it.
I love how powerful it is when practiced, a literal virtue for future world-building.
BUT it’s been harder and harder to stay tender as of late. The overwhelmingly depressing 24-hour news cycle holds us captive and between the impending doom of our dying planet, the never-ending pandemic, and the everyday violence created by living under a system that puts profit over the earth and its people means that practicing tenderness as a form of resistance with ourselves and the world around us, has become absolutely imperative for our collective survival.
The word tender from the old French word tendre first recorded in the 11th century for “soft, delicate, young” derives from the Latin word ten/tendere meaning “to stretch, to extend”. I want to use this space to work through how we think about what tenderness is. To me, being able to cultivate tenderness allows us to become stronger, more flexible, ‘to stretch’, to be able to not only endure but (because we must dare to imagine!) even thrive! Pain in life is inescapable, but tenderness is a teacher that shows us how to move through the wild ebbs and flows with love, care, and deep compassion. In this way, tenderness is so personal yet so political, small and giant, delicate and ferocious, all at once.
To create this space of inquiry I felt the newsletter format worked best as even though I have built so much of my life and ‘career’ up to this point through the use of apps like Instagram, I have become pretty disillusioned with what they have become. (I co-wrote a book about this disillusionment in 2019 called ‘Mixed Feelings - Exploring the emotional impact of our digital habits’ - which you can read about more here :) ) I think sharing knowledge, stories, and tools have become more important than ever especially when we can no longer share physical space but I have come to detest how these apps have been engineered to exploit the most human parts of us that deeply crave love, community, and connection. So instead of letting my frustrations continue to be a paralysis, I am trying something new and setting the intention to practice what the early days of the internet felt like for me as well as for so many of us; intimate, sweet, curious, and earnest!
I’m setting up a paid subscription for those who want to pay me for this work. For the time being everything I post on here will be accessible to all but the paid subscriptions help me stay accountable to this process as well as can start to give me a lifeline to new income streams as I navigate shifts and changes in my work life that allow me to build intimacy with an audience that is truly mine.
With TC I’m also trying to practice expressing myself amidst a moment of deep shifts and inner change, so I'm seeing this project as a live archive to document my process of transformation while also trying to see how being forced to cultivate and uphold a creative practice during this time can be the medicine I need right now.
After a whole year of living in chronic pain that led to a disability that left me unable to write (which I am still in the process of recovering from) I am also thinking a lot about accessibility, so whatever I write will also be available as an audio version and the posts will be a mix of formats, sometimes me thinking out loud, a video, photographs, music, recipes….etc so please bear with me while I experiment!
To close, this thing is my humble attempt at a living practice of reaching and stretching out to you and I’m waiting for you to reach back and grab my hand so we can move through it together. I’m always open to musings and replies, the moon is a mere reflection of her sun, so what you see in me is already in you.
In love and tenderness,
naomi xxx
1. welcome <3