Do you consider yourself emotionally strong?
Can you look at your life and point to moments when you deeply felt your emotional and personal strength at work? Can you draw a line to between the hard times and the strength that carried you through?
The question of strength is one that I sit with a lot these days. Looking at this fail safe, rainy day excess of grit, resolve, and in many cases pure determination to get through something that I’ve been storing up throughout my life.
My nest egg to protect this wildly open heart that I wear on my sleeve.
But now as I sit in one of the rainiest periods of my life, dealing with the death of my mother, my person, my guide, I watch as my emotional strength depletes. It’s become a scarce resource day over day, hour over hour, moment over moment sometimes.
The problem with emotional strength is you can’t see it you have to feel to use it. So now as I move through the hardest heartbreak of my life, I can picture my internal reserve and I watch helplessly as it depletes with no avenue to build it back up.
This complex relationship we have with emotional strength is even harder to navigate as the people around us admire it, and you for your use of it. It’s often the thing people are praised for and regarded as astonishing for the way they move through the rain. Think about the people who see you every day, if they believe you have this well of strength, they want to know how you banked so much, how you continue on, how you’re going to replace the strength you’ve spent.
They watch you for answers, a roadmap, step by step on how to deal with this massive grief that tests you. They watch with a dark curiosity to prepare themselves for their next heartbreak. Will they manage better, recover quicker? What graces will they show others that you couldn’t? They watch you because they need a prototype to model what grief looks like. More importantly they need to know that others have made this journey and survived.
For me that’s when that wildly open heart on my sleeve closes up to focus on pulling from the strength, that people so admire, to find some way forward to help it heal.
The moment that takes the most courage, not strength, for me, is to put my heart back on my sleeve. I note courage over strength here because when you go out in to the world with a broken heart it is driven by something deeper.
Something that tells you there is no option but forward with your new wounds.
When your heart breaks it leave marks and no amount of strength can undo that.
You can’t intake this grief and come out of that process the same.
Love Ray
