When Strength Becomes Survival

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned how to carry heavy things so well that people stopped asking whether the weight was hurting us.

As a therapist, I sit with high performers every day. Female executives, professional and college athletes, caregivers, and leaders. The common thread is rarely weakness. More often, it is the exact opposite. They are exceptionally capable people who have become highly conditioned to endure.

They know how to push through exhaustion. How to compartmentalize grief. How to smile during crisis. How to keep producing while emotionally hyperventilating.

Strength quietly becomes survival.

I understand this clinically and personally. I grew up as a Black student athlete in a suburb of Cincinnati that my parents worked incredibly hard to access. They built their home from the ground up during a time when Black progression and financial elevation were not always welcomed with open arms. Racism became part of my daily experience, especially on the school bus. I still remember the feeling of sitting silently through comments and humiliation I never repeated to adults.

Not because I was fearless, but because at age 13 I felt it was my duty to stay strong and not interrupt my parents’ joy. I could not bear the thought of handing them another burden after everything they sacrificed to create opportunity for our family. So I learned early how to carry difficult emotions quietly.

Strength suddenly becomes sacrifice, suppression, and silence.

Years later, after navigating my own trials as a scholarship basketball player at Xavier University and adjusting to life married to a college basketball coach, life introduced yet another blow. My daughter was diagnosed at four years old with Alopecia Universalis, the most severe form of autoimmune hair loss. A clinical phrase that hardly captures the emotional reality of watching your child lose every strand of hair, along with her eyelashes and eyebrows, before kindergarten, and wondering what you did to cause it.

Children should not have to learn courage that young, and parents should not have to carry that kind of guilt.

Thankfully, our family learned how to navigate wigs, treatment decisions, questions from strangers, and the emotional balancing act between protecting a child and empowering her. That experience eventually led me into advocacy work with the National Alopecia Areata Foundation executive board. From adversity came advocacy.

More recently, life introduced me to the quiet heartbreak of ambiguous grief as I watch my mother live with Alzheimer's disease. She is still physically here, yet unreachable in ways that are difficult to explain unless you have lived it. There are days when I grow weary of being the strong one in a grief that offers so little closure. Unfortunately, we become fluent in endurance long before we ever become fluent in rest. 

Some of us have mastered carrying emotional weight with such elegance that people mistake it for ease. I often remind my clients that good mental health is not the absence of uncomfortable emotions, nor the avoidance of adversity, but the courage to face both honestly.

Strength is not a performance but a process.

As I reluctantly enter menopause, I have been weight training again in an effort to sustain muscle and increase strength as my hormones decrease. Psychologically, many high achievers are used to carrying heavy weight, but they are trying to lift it all on their own without spotters. No motivational support. No one around to provide safety. And no one helping them recognize when the load has become too heavy.

Fatigue follows, and with fatigue comes the risk of injury, both physical and emotional.

We get stronger not because life becomes lighter, but because we finally accept that we cannot carry the weight alone. That realization has changed both my clinical work and my personal life.

The truth is, strength is not built by pretending pain does not exist. It is built by increasing our capacity to move through adversity with honesty, self grace, and permission to ask for support. Every day, I hear stories of heartbreak, abandonment, regret, diagnosis, and unimaginable loss. But I also witness extraordinary courage, healing, humor, love, miracles, and reinvention. The mountains stand beside the valleys more often than we pause to realize.

Those stories, as well as my own, remind me that surviving is not the highest form of living, and even the strongest among us were never meant to carry the weight alone.

Jonelle Massey is the owner of Agility Counseling Group    www.agilitycounselinggroup.com