This one came from a real place. I'm somewhere in the middle of my own reset — still finding my footing, still learning what strength actually means for me. I'm sharing it anyway, because the women I trust most are the ones who tell the truth before they have it all together.
Maybe We’ve Been Wrong About Strength: A reflection for Women’s Month — and honestly, for any month you need it
There’s a version of strength we were all handed growing up. Nobody sat us down and explained it. We just… absorbed it. Watched it. Learned it from the women who raised us, who worked beside us, who loved us the best way they knew how.
And what it looked like was this: you carry it. All of it. You don’t stop, you don’t slow down, and you definitely don’t ask for help. You show up — for everyone, for everything — and you do it without complaint. And when people say I don’t know how you do it, you smile and say you just do.
That was strength. That was the definition we inherited.
And for a long time, I lived by it. A lot of us did.
But somewhere in my 40s — somewhere between the exhaustion I kept explaining away and the life I kept putting on hold — I started to wonder. What if we got this wrong?
When endurance gets mistaken for strength
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the strong one: it’s a role that, once you take it, is very hard to put down.
You become the reliable one. The one who handles it. The one people call when things fall apart — at work, in the family, in the friendships. And there’s a part of you that takes quiet pride in that. Because it means something, being needed. It means you matter.
But at some point, reliable starts to cost you something.
It costs you rest, because there’s always something else that needs doing. It costs you honesty, because I’m struggling feels like a betrayal of the role. It costs you, slowly and quietly, the sense of who you are underneath all the doing.
And here’s the part that took me a long time to see: endurance and strength are not the same thing. Enduring something — surviving it, pushing through it, not breaking under it — that’s real. That’s something. But it’s not the same as thriving. And for too long, I think many of us settled for enduring and called it enough.
Burnout doesn’t always look like falling apart
We have this image of burnout that’s dramatic. A breakdown. A moment of collapse. But the truth is, burnout often looks like functioning perfectly.
It looks like a full calendar and a smile. It looks like being everyone’s first call and not wanting to disappoint them. It looks like lying awake at 1am, too tired to sleep, still mentally running through tomorrow’s list. It looks like saying I’m fine, just busy so many times that you actually start to believe it.
The dangerous thing about this kind of burnout — the high-functioning kind — is that it hides. It hides from the people around you. And it hides from you.
Because you’re still showing up. You’re still delivering. From the outside, you look like someone who has it together. And so the story you tell yourself is: this is fine. This is just life. This is what strong women do.
But what if it isn’t? What if that exhaustion you keep pushing past isn’t a test of your strength — but a sign that something needs to change?
The fear of changing direction
This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it’s where a lot of women in their 40s quietly live.
You can feel it — the pull toward something different. A different kind of work. A different way of showing up in your life. A dream you put in a drawer because the timing wasn’t right, or someone needed you, or you told yourself you’d get to it later.
And now it’s later. And you’re standing at the edge of something that feels both necessary and terrifying.
Because changing direction at this stage of life is complicated. There are responsibilities. There are people depending on you. There are years of identity tied up in who you’ve been and what you’ve built. And there’s a voice — quiet but persistent — that says it’s too late. You should have figured this out sooner. What will people think?
That voice is not truth. But it can feel like it is.
What I’ve come to believe is this: staying in something that no longer fits you — out of fear, out of habit, out of not wanting to shake things up — that’s not strength. That’s just staying. And you are worth more than just staying.
What I think strength actually looks like
I’m rewriting the definition for myself. Slowly, imperfectly, one choice at a time. And here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now.
Strength looks like resting — not because you’ve earned it, but because you need it. Because your body and your mind are worth taking care of. Because rest is not laziness; it’s how you stay whole.
Strength looks like saying no — clearly, kindly, and without a paragraph of apology afterward. Because every no to the wrong thing is a yes to something that actually matters. And your yes should mean something.
Strength looks like asking for help — and this one is hard, especially for those of us who’ve spent years being the helper. But needing support doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re human. And letting people show up for you — that takes its own kind of courage.
Strength looks like changing direction — even when it’s scary. Even when it doesn’t make sense to everyone around you. Even when you’re doing it at 42 or 45 or 48 and the world makes you feel like the window has passed. It hasn’t. Starting over, starting differently, starting at all — that is one of the bravest things a person can do.
Maybe it’s about choosing what’s worth carrying
If I could go back and say something to my younger self — the one who was so proud of how much she could carry — I think it would be this:
You don’t have to hold all of it. You were never supposed to.
Strength was never meant to be about how much weight you could bear before you broke. Maybe it was always meant to be about wisdom — knowing what’s worth picking up, knowing what’s okay to put down, knowing that you are not less of a woman, not less of a person, for choosing yourself.
This Women’s Month, I want to celebrate not just the women who endured — but the women who chose. Who chose rest. Who chose honesty. Who chose to walk away from what wasn’t working and walk toward something true.
If you’re in the middle of that right now — if it’s heavy and uncertain and you’re not quite sure where you’re going — I just want you to know: you’re not lost. You’re just finding a better way.
And that is strength. The real kind.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your story. Drop a comment below or send me a message — because the more we talk about this honestly, the less alone we all feel. 💛
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