Soft Heart, Sturdy Armor

It's the night of January 20, 2025. Earlier today, Donald Trump took office as the 47th President of the United States, and already the executive orders have begun. I am trying both to stay informed and not allow the onslaught of news overwhelm me: it is an impossible line to walk tonight.

I’ve been thinking about starting this Substack since the week after the 2024 election. I was driving home from an out-of-town work event and listening to the Amicus podcast episode entitled “Deep Breath, Here We Go.” Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, the podcast’s host and co-host respectively, were winding the episode down. It had been a hard, but necessary, listen filled both with predictions of what Trump would do in his second term, and lamentations for all the pain and suffering that was certain to befall large swathes of Americans.

In the last few moments of the podcast, Dahlia said something that struck me as I sped down the freeway, the sunlight weak through the trees. She said, “we are going to have to simultaneously have absolutely, like, immutable Teflon shells…and at the same time, to continue to have like soft big hearts to understand what love and community are.”

I thought about that idea off and on for the rest of the ride home—a few hours anyway. It seemed to me an impossible task, as Dahlia said, because it “feels like you have to choose” between the soft heart and the immutable shell. The challenge, of course, is that one option will allow you your humanity while almost certainly crushing you in the process; the other will protect you while exacting the cost of that humanity. Still, our job is to try to walk that line.

In the months between the election and today, January 20, 2025, I toyed with the idea of starting a Substack that might be focused on what it means to try to do both things at once. It seemed to me that whatever I wanted to do in this moment, the foundation of it must rest on finding the balance between these two ways of being, and that probably quite a few people would feel similarly. I played with the idea of a title, running “Soft Heart,” which seemed to perfectly encapsulate that side of the coin, with something that might roll off the tongue better than “Immutable Teflon Shell” (no shade to Dahlia). I was stuck on that second part for a long while when I mentioned to one of my best friends, B—, my idea for the Substack and the quote it was based on. At that point, my best title was “Soft Heart, Steel Armor” (I had discarded “shell” since it didn’t evoke the strength I wanted it to).

“Whoa,” she said. “My dad used to tell me, before I had to go do anything really hard, ‘Remember, soft heart, sturdy armor.’”

And there it was. Somehow “sturdy armor” captured the tone and meaning and intention so much better than anything I had come up with. It’s not that the armor is impossibly hard—it’s that it is built to withstand what is to come. But it’s homemade, rugged even. Maybe a little worse for wear, especially after the last 8 years.

So that’s how we’ve arrived here. Soft Heart, Sturdy Armor is an advice column for all of us trying to navigate this moment, what it means to live in the United States under a growing authoritarian threat, and how we can hope to hold on to our precious human selves while also keeping those same selves safe.

-Sturdy Armor

Questions for the column? Send them to: sturdyarmor@gmail.com