Strength Looks Different in This Season

A bare tree standing in high wind with branches holding

We’ve got a picture of strength in this country and it’s all summer imagery. Full canopy, heavy fruit, everything visible and abundant and going.

Nobody puts a November tree on a motivational poster.

Which is a shame, because a bare tree in a forty mile an hour wind is doing the harder job. All the leaves are gone, there’s nothing to show for it, nobody’s photographing it, and it’s holding.

The strength you’re using and not counting

Let me tell you what I see people do in hard seasons that they don’t count as anything.

Getting up. I know how that sounds. If you’ve ever had a stretch where your body felt like it was made out of wet sand, you know what it costs to swing your feet to the floor, and you know that nobody saw you do it.

Being decent to people who don’t know. The cashier, the kid’s teacher, the person who asks how you’re doing in the church lobby. Holding a civil conversation while your insides are on fire is work.

Not sending the text. Choosing not to blow something up at eleven at night when the case for blowing it up feels airtight. The absence of a catastrophe is invisible by definition, so you’ll never get credit for it, including from yourself.

Telling the truth to one person. Most people in a hard season have a fully-built public version of themselves. Dropping it, even once, even for twenty minutes, takes something.

Feeding somebody. Badly, maybe. Late. Still counts.

Going to the appointment. Especially the one you’ve rescheduled twice.

Why you can’t see it

Because strength that keeps you functioning doesn’t feel like strength. It feels like barely.

This is the trick of it. Effort is measured against capacity, not against outcome. When your capacity is at thirty percent, the ordinary day costs you what a crisis used to cost. And from the inside all you notice is that you’re doing less than you used to, so you grade yourself down.

I’d ask you to do something fairer. Measure the effort, not the output. Anybody can be impressive with a full tank.

What actually changes in this kind of season

Strength stops being about pushing and starts being about holding.

Push strength is what gets you through a deadline, a move, a semester, a sprint. It’s finite by design and it’s the only kind most of us were ever taught.

Hold strength is slower. It’s what a caregiver uses over four years. Maybe it’s what a person uses in the second year of grief when everybody else has moved on and nobody’s bringing anything by. It’s not dramatic, it can’t be done at a sprint, and it requires you to actually eat and sleep, which push strength lets you skip.

The mistake I see most is people trying to run a hold season on push strength. Two weeks of white-knuckle, crash, self-loathing, two more weeks of white-knuckle. That cycle will take you apart.

Rebuilding what strength means

Retire the old measuring stick. If your standard is what you could do in your best year, you’ll lose that comparison daily for as long as this lasts, and losing daily does real damage to how you see yourself.

Count the invisible stuff on purpose. Three lines at night, what it cost and what you did anyway. You won’t remember it otherwise. Your brain does not encode “held it together” as an event.

Accept help without making a payment plan. Taking help is strength, not debt. A lot of people would rather collapse than be seen needing something, and that’s not toughness, that’s pride with a good publicist.

Ask who taught you that strength had to be loud. There’s usually a specific person. Sometimes a whole family style where the only acceptable posture was fine.

Let somebody see the bad version once in a while. The person who only ever sees you strong doesn’t actually know you.

For the woman who has been strong for everybody

I want to speak directly to somebody here, because I know she’s reading.

You’ve been the one. The one who handles it, who makes the calls, who shows up with the casserole, who holds it together at the funeral so other people can fall apart. You’re good at it. Somewhere along the line it stopped being something you do and became the price of admission for being loved.

Here’s my hard truth, gently but without softening it. Being the strong one is not a personality. It’s a role, and there’s usually a story underneath it about what happened when you weren’t strong.

You’re allowed to be a person who needs things. You were a whole person before you ever became useful to anybody.

What I’d say

That tree on the ridge isn’t performing. It’s just built for the wind and it’s doing the thing it was built to do, and when the wind quits, it’ll still be standing there, and nobody will make a single remark about it.

You’re doing that right now. I see it even if you don’t.

Never let anybody make you feel less than, and you are always more than enough, including on the days when all you did was hold.

This is education, not therapy. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and tired of being the strong one, you can put that down in my office. Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

When Things Fall Away: The Sacred Power of the Fall Season