Leather & Roses

By Emily Kirkwood

You’re praised for your resilience, but only when it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.

We often mistake endurance for cruelty and tenderness for weakness, without realising the truth lies in their coexistence. To endure is to engage with time itself, to accept that life foists its burdens without pause. Real endurance extends beyond mere resistance; it’s a choice to stay present through hardship, a tranquil acceptance of reality, shaped by intention and fortitude. And its with this that one’s tenderness finds its measure, not through the opposition of strength and fervency, but its deliberate openness that allows strength to exist meaningfully.

One’s tenderness does not diminish their endurance, it accompanies it. In this coexistence we find a subtle power: the ability to endure without losing warmth, to feel deeply without collapsing under the weight of feeling. To open yourself in the midst of adversity is not to weaken but to exhibit the courage to remain human when difficulty tempts us to wish it forsaken. This is why you buy notebooks after not even finishing the last one, your way of sustaining that illusion of progress without confronting the reality that you still have half the paper left. When strength is stripped of tenderness, it ossifies into severity. It loses its pulse, its purpose and becomes an empty exertion of will. Like the depletion of tenderness from strength, tenderness without strength unfolds into mere sentimentality, beautiful yet untenable, unable to grasp onto any lasting form. Love, too, needs both. Devotion without strength will crumble, and strength without devotion will grow cold.

It's only in their union that love can endure to become something existential.

Strength without softness may not really be strength at all, but the denial of feeling. There’s a particular tragedy in how much we can bear the art of hiding, and our silence for composure. Since when has perseverance been praised more than honesty? And is that why we turn endurance into a silent surrender, walking the path of least life?