This Myth called Strength
I was sitting in the office with my brother-in-law when he said it. We were talking about how, since I moved thousands of miles away, no family has come to see me. Well. The only family that did come is the one life decided to take away from me. And I told him I'm not sure it's a great deal, honestly. I like the peace. I like the distance.
He nodded, and then he said it: You are so strong.
It landed different this time. I found myself repeating it back, the word rolling around in my mouth like I was trying to understand what he actually meant. Strong. Is that what this is?
Because I've been thinking about all the times people have called me that. Strong. Courageous. Resilient. All the words we use for people who do hard things.
But here's what I'm wondering: Is moving thousands of miles away from your family, starting over alone in a city where you know no one. Is that strength? Or is that the ability to disassociate so thoroughly that leaving doesn't break you?
Is solo traveling to destinations people have barely touched, chasing light and landscape and the kind of solitude that feels like prayer. Is that courage? Or is it another way of running? Another way of saying: I'm safest when I'm alone.
Is having undeniable faith that my sister will come back, that God will restore what feels broken beyond repair, that I can hold my family together in the meantime while parts of it crumble. Is that strength and courage? Or is it the only way my brain knows how to survive when survival is the only option left?
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I think we misname things.
We call numbness resilience. We call the ability to function while falling apart strength. We call dissociation faith. We call the wall we build so nothing can hurt us anymore. We call that protection. We call it survival. We call it courage.
And maybe some of it is.
Maybe it is strength to move your entire life across the country. Maybe it is courage to travel alone to places that terrify you. Maybe it is faith to believe in resurrection when everything looks like a tomb.
But the cost of that strength. What about that? The distance that protects you also isolates you. The numbness that lets you function also means you're not really living. The faith that holds you together also means you're carrying the weight alone.
I repeated the word because I needed to understand the gap between what people see and what I actually am. They see someone who survives. They call it strength. And I'm sitting there wondering if I'm just very, very good at not feeling.
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What I know now is this: strength is not the absence of pain. It's not the ability to keep moving when you should probably stop and break. It's not the wall you build so high that nothing can reach you.
Real strength might be something else entirely. It might be letting people see you fall. It might be admitting that the distance you created wasn't because you were strong enough to leave. It was because you were fragile enough that you had to.
It might be that the only thing holding me together in Maryland right now, the only thing that makes me show up for Christian and the kids day after day while my heart is being rewired. It's not my strength at all. It's His. It's the faith that wasn't born from my courage but planted in me when I was too small to plant anything in myself.
I am not strong.
But I am held.
And maybe that's what people are seeing when they call me strong. Maybe they're seeing the hand of God on a life, and they're just using the only language they have.
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"For when I am weak, then I am strong." 2 Corinthians 12:10
