People love to call women like me strong.
And when I say women like me, I mean:
Women with chronic illness.
Women who take care of everything around them without blinking.
Women with so much relationship trauma it could play out on a movie screen.
“Strong” is meant to be praise.
And I’ve always taken it that way.
Until I learned the cost of always being strong.
What People See
When people look at me, they see a physically and mentally strong woman. A woman capable of lifting weights and pushing through anything life throws her way.
People love to throw around words like resilient and strong like they’re badges of honor. And they are… to some extent.
They see me showing up.
Holding everything together.
They assume that anytime life throws something new my way, I’ll handle it with grace and dignity.
The problem is that people hate seeing strong people break.
What People Don’t See
Strong women break.
It’s just usually not public.
I can post the photos from the hospital room.
I can post the Instagram-worthy captions explaining my health struggles.
But even those show a woman who made it out the other side with her smile and sass still intact.
What they don’t show is the woman who spent those nights ugly crying into her pillow.
A woman who fought with God.
Who begged for answers.
They don’t show the doubt.
The exhaustion.
The breaking points.
The moments where giving up felt like the only option while knowing it wasn’t actually a choice.
And those are the exact moments where strength lives.
In the messy, unfiltered, unsexy space between breaking down and almost giving up.
The Cost of Being Strong
Being the strong one is about more than physical strength.
Physical strength is easy compared to the weight of always being strong for everyone else.
It means people—friends, family, coworkers—expect more from you.
It means being the person everyone runs to for guidance, for support, for a place to pour their hearts out.
It means putting on a front that says, I’ll be okay. I’ll get through this.
Even when it feels like your body is breaking apart and your mind is right behind it.
It means that even when people know you’re struggling,
you’ve learned not to let them see too much of it.
Very few people in my life have seen the breaksdown in that space between strength and wanting to quit.
Sometimes being strong means I don’t even give myself permission to fall apart.
The Part I Don’t Talk About
There was a time in my life after my divorce, and during the two most toxic relationships that followed, when I wanted to run away.
And truthfully, I did.
I ran from the voice in my head that told me I wasn’t enough.
I let myself slip.
But people needed me.
They expected more from me.
For a month straight, I drank a bottle of wine every single night.
I told myself it was how I relaxed, how I recovered.
But really, I was running from the truth:
that my relationship was slowly destroying me.
But even when I tried to give up,
I couldn’t.
The Shift
Somewhere between the bottles of wine and the late-night crying sessions, something in me shifted.
I told my friends the truth about what I was doing, and that I couldn’t keep going like that.
I gave up drinking.
I started doing yoga.
I started meditating.
Even though everything in me wanted to run away, I didn’t.
In that in-between moment where the choas meets the
breaking point…I chose a different path.
What I Know Now
There was a time when I resented being the strong one.
Always having to choose to never quit.
Always having to fight.
I didn’t understand why it couldn’t just be easy—
why I couldn’t just be better without having to constantly having to fight to be.
But now I understand:
That is what being strong means.
It’s not about everything going right.
It’s not about never struggling.
It’s about making that decision over and over again.
The decision to not to give up.
To put the bottle down.
To choose your mental health.
To choose yourself.
Strength isn’t built in the moments of praise.
It’s built in the moments when everything is falling apart.
The moments you choose to keep going anyway.
It’s in those moments that I learned
Just because I carry it well
doesn’t mean it isn’t heavy.
XO,
Samantha Jo