In Case No One Told You How Strong You Are, This One’s For You

Strong and soft and everything in between

Another new day arrives, and we summon the strength to face it with all the uncertainty it entails. Our hands hesitate above social media. Do we want to know what transpired while we slept? Will there be news of a positive change — or just more of the same?

Still, we check the news. We make our coffee, as bold and strong as we need to be. For me, I add extra sweetness because I need to be sweet, too. Then, we face it.

When someone asks me how I got to be strong, I think of grit, first and always. I think of persistence. But I also think of the softness under all that strength, the big aching heart of me.

We think we cannot be both soft and strong, but the strongest among us often have the softest hearts. We can be fierce and fiercely loving. It’s not one or the other.

In fact, I would venture to say that strength requires softness. Otherwise, instead of becoming strong, we become hard — incapable of compassion and driven only by what we need. True strength comes from being able to balance our courage with our vulnerability, to pair big hearts with an iron will. We keep rising because the only other choice is untenable.

We become this person through incredible grit and strength of character and a stubborn refusal to surrender to the shitstorm all around us. We are tough and confident. We have weathered more than we thought we ever could, and we keep going — relentless and so invested in our personal growth that every hit of pain is just the growing kind. We don’t let hurt destroy us unless it’s to build us back stronger than before.

But inside the heart of every fierce individual is a softness. A vulnerable core. A hurting place where we wish that life had gone easier on us. A place where we long to be loved and to be seen as more than the fortress we appear to be. A steady pulse of love and dreams and desires too often thwarted and so desperately needed. A quiet knowing in ourselves and an understanding that it’s up to us to create the life we need rather than waiting to receive it.

The tough, independent ones weren’t born to the world this way. We became this. We were buried deep in the darkness and pushed out into the light, growing until we could bloom, rising up to meet the rain and the sun.

We endure.

Every disappointment, a frost. Every heartache, a storm. Still, we continue.

It’s easy to put us on a pedestal without acknowledging what it cost us to be this way, to celebrate our achievements and forget the hard work behind them, and to fail to see us wholly as we are with all the bruised, broken, bleeding places we’ve turned into masterpieces or guideposts for others.

In the heart of every independent soul is the understanding that the only way we ever can get better is to exist within our struggle and experience it. To heal. To allow time and space and honesty to do their work. To keep going deeper. To love more. To do no harm but hold tight to our boundaries. To show up. To keep going. To become as loving and as fierce as we can be. To transform every moment of pain into ecstatic beauty.

We are artists, creating our lives. We are gardeners, growing ourselves. We feel the soft space of our hearts and the cold steel of our outer edges, and we know — finally — that we can be both soft and strong and everything in between.

We are beautifully human, all bone and blood and skin and beating heart, all flickering thoughts and striking feeling. Imperfectly perfect and whole. Not broken even when we feel that we are breaking. Strong and unbearably soft. Rising, by letting ourselves fall and fail only to emerge stronger.

Faced with another day of uncertainty, it’s not that we’re fearless. We know fear. But we also know that we need to put one step in front of the other, to do the next right thing and then the next. We keep going, coffee-fueled and relentless, out into the world to meet whatever comes next.

“The women I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out. They got that way because shit went wrong and they handled it. They handled it a thousand different ways on a thousands different days, but they handled it. Those women are my superheroes.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert