A Hundred Ways to Hold Her: Poetry About Self-Protection and Becoming

There are ways we learn to protect ourselves that no one else sees. Not loud or obvious, but practiced over time, until they become a quiet way of being we no longer question.

It can look like a softening of expression, a careful choosing of what to show, a quiet holding back of what feels too heavy to place in the wrong hands. And after a while, it begins to feel less like protection, and more like something that simply lives within us.

There is a subtle knowing in it, often unspoken, that what we carry may not be met with care. So we adjust. We draw it inward. We remain present, but not fully revealed.

And in that quiet adjustment, something deeper begins to take shape. Not because we wanted to disappear, but because there was no safe place to be fully seen.

The verse shared below is one of the intimate reflections woven through A Hundred Ways to Hold Her. This verse speaks to the quiet ways we learned to protect ourselves when our pain could not be held, and how, over time, we began to disappear in order to stay.

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Over time, almost without noticing, we begin to shape ourselves around what can be held. We soften where we once would have spoken. We quiet what feels like too much. We make ourselves easier to receive, all in the hope of keeping something that feels like peace.

But there is a cost to that kind of peace.

It asks us, gently at first, to step back from the fullness of who we are. To dim what was never meant to be dimmed. To carry less of ourselves into the spaces we move through.

These ways of being do not come from weakness. They come from awareness, from learning in real time what can and cannot be held by the spaces around us. There is a quiet intelligence in that, a deep sensitivity, a way of moving through the world that protects something essential within us.

But even the ways we learned to disappear carry a deeper truth beneath them. They reveal how much we were trying to protect, how carefully we learned to move through spaces that could not hold us. And in that, they quietly point to what was always deserving of care. That what we were holding deserved to be seen. That our experience was never too much, only too much for the wrong space.

And when we begin to see that clearly, something shifts again.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. But in the smallest, quietest ways, we begin to choose differently. We begin to move toward spaces that can hold us, or gently step away from the ones that cannot.

It is a quiet realignment. A returning.

And once we feel that truth within us, once we know it in a way that no longer asks for permission, something settles. We no longer reach for what asks us to become less than who we are. ♥

If you recognize yourself here, may this feel like a gentle remembering. You were never meant to become less than to be held. You were never meant to trade the fullness of who you are for something that only resembles peace.

As this collection continues to unfold, I’ll be sharing verses, reflections, and moments from the journey here on my blog, on Instagram, and via my YouTube channel.

May this space always feel like somewhere your heart can rest. ♥

If you’re just joining this journey, or would like to return to earlier verses, you’ll find previous posts linked below.

• Returning to What is True: Poetry, Presence, and the Inner Work of Becoming
• A Hundred Ways to Hold Her: Honouring the Healing Journey Through Poetry
• A Hundred Ways to Hold Her: A Healing Benediction for Courage and Renewal
• A Hundred Ways to Hold Her: Poetry About Resilience and Keeping Your Light
• A Hundred Ways to Hold Her: A Healing Benediction on Resilience and Becoming
• Where Peace Finds Us

Natalie, xo

This space is an offering of presence.
Words shaped through listening, reflection, and reverence.
A place where becoming is honoured, and the voice remains true.

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