how strong are you really?

Years ago, I began to feel strong. I was training for a half-marathon, a whim that slowly began to take over large aspects of my life—influencing how I ate, how I drank, how I arranged my days, even causing me to begin to seriously pursue weight-lifting and high intensity training.

I woke up at 4AM, 5 times a week in pursuit of strength. And that was just the weights. I would also run after a full day teaching at least 4 times a week too—hours beside the river, all sweat and salt and whatever music I was into at the time.

It was during this season that I would notice strength in small ways — easily hauling bags of groceries to and from my car. Walking up multiple flights of stairs without any shortness of breath or burning in my legs. My neck, which is always problematic, was quiet for months on months. I held a certain confidence in approaching physical tasks that I might have avoided before.

And while there was never a particular moment where I declared the word as one that belonged to me, there was, in that season, a diffuse and pervasive sense of strength.

Now, I have always been lucky to experience good physical ability and I am grateful for this. But alongside this lifetime of healthy physicality, I have admittedly struggled to feel strong. Even in youth, I couldn’t ever do a pull-up or a full, proper push-up. It’s always been hard for me to build muscle and even harder to maintain it. This physical fact is also exacerbated by a lifetime disinterest in weight-lifting.

My penchant has always been for the long distances, the hours of repetitive movement — the strange, emptying that long-distance swimming or running provokes in my mind. But the experience of lifting heavy things? Of straining against gravity to inch my chin above a bar or pull a weight above the earth’s hold? It’s just never called me.

Even in the year of 4AMs, what propelled me out of bed was not the activity itself but the cameraderie I felt in the band of 4AMers, the way we cheered each other on, filled each other’s water bottles, stood by the TRX ropes and clapped for each other to do just one more rep. I love to be a part of a team, and I always have, so the strength that began to layer itself into my arms, my legs, my core, that was all just a useful and welcome byproduct of the community I found in those small hours at the gym.

After I would run the half-marathon, things would change. I began to suffer horrific exercise-induced migraines that effectively ended HIIT and running and shortly after this, K would die and the world, in COVID, and my own world, in grief, would grind to an eerie halt. The physical strength that I had worked so hard to gain would quickly erode. Another loss in a dizzying time of immense loss.

Now, a strange part of the universe of strangeness of grief and the ways in which people tend to interact with grievers is that while I was physically the weakest I had ever been after K died (not just due to inactivity but also to the collapse of my health), I have never been told more often in my life about how strong I was.

You are so strong.

Grievers, including myself, hear this all the time. It comes from a good place, most of the time. People tend to be shocked by what has happened to you and this makes them feel scared, and in turn, a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit weaker. They look at you, in a nightmare that is now barely touching their lives by their proximity to you, and they cannot fathom how you are standing in front of them. They tend to attribute this to strength.

I’ve always found this hard to hear because in my own grief, and in the conversations I’ve had with others in grief, no one feels strong. The amount of times my body physically collapsed beneath the weight of panic, sorrow, and overwhelm after K died is so many I gave up counting.

Recently, I had someone call me strong, once again. It was in loose reference to the five year anniversary of K’s death which was 3 days ago. I asked them what they meant? I told them no one is strong in grief. That I would literally never attribute strength to my being here, five years after his heart stopped.

When I said this, the person I was talking to wondered what I would attribute to my continued existence?

I offered to them what I wish to offer to anyone in grief, supporting someone in grief, or in a time where you feel unable. I told them that when K died and my health shuddered, both pulverized my own idea of strength. I was brought into undeniable confrontation with the fact that I was not going to make it on my own.

So, I asked for help, I told the person I was talking to. I asked for a lot of help and when I was lucky enough to receive it, I accepted it.

Wouldn’t I see that as a kind of strength? countered my conversation-mate.

But I wouldn’t yield.

To ask for help, I contended, you have to admit that you actually can’t do it on your own. And when we accept help, the harvest that we reap is so much more than any idea of what capacity a person has to withstand great pressure. When we admit that we can’t, and that we need others to help us do what we cannot, we enter an abundance of what I call shared tenderness, and while it is powerful — I don’t think it can be limited to only strength.

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