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Because what is strength anyway?
Do you ever think about what it means when people call you strong?
Do people call you strong?
It’s one of those confusing things that is often meant as a compliment and takes on another meaning depending on who says it.
But it’s not about taking offense, not really. It’s about defining yourself without getting trapped in one of life’s thought paradoxes.
My mother can call me strong.
When she says it I can’t take it any other way than how she offers it. From Black woman of her generation to Black woman of my generation the phrase is bent through the kaleidoscope of wisdom.
The kind that comes from experience and is meant to crown you in glory. Only a queen can ordain you as such. She offers it to me as a gift, an admiration of the spine I built, one whose foundation is her Love.
I used to get upset when they affixed this name to her.
Because it was coded.
Distorted.
It meant something else. I didn’t know at the time what and it made me mad.
Do you know how strong your mother is? can also mean Oh I was there that time when they kept doing her wrong and I didn’t lift a finger to help because I knew she could take it and I just didn’t want to get involved.
It can mean I have a valid excuse not to be supportive of her. It can mean since she doesn’t trumpet the fact that she needs me I can neglect her. It can even mean you’re her daughter so it doesn’t matter if you’re only 11/16/21, you’re strong like her so why don’t you pick up my slack?
Is someone’s ability to bear pain really a reason to for you to leave them in it?
If you have no other version of normal, you may learn this as fact.
I’m wary of this word.
Picture of a tree I took. I’m obsessed with trees and the sky.
When people think of you as strong, they can think it means you don’t need help, because you’ll be fine, and you can take it and you’re fortified with oak.
So wait, can you hurt?
Are things animals people – like you allowed to hurt?
Doesn’t admitting to your pain diminish you?
Doesn’t it make you weak?
I fell for the banana in the tailpipe.
For nearly two decades I had a debilitating, depressing and painful spinal condition. The last 7 years after that I had a second layer of nerve pain on top of that.
And I never complained about it to my family. Some of my closest friends didn’t know until I moved back to the DC area.
At one point I gave up trying to convince the doctors that I hurt.
This might seem like a brave thing to do.
It is not. It’s un-brave. Un-smart. Un-strong.
All because I was haunted by the apparition of strength.
When you internalize your pain, when you try to pretend it’s not there and evolve past it, first, you get this zen sensation.
Like ohmmmm I am one with the universe and this isn’t something that can take me downnn nnnnohhhhmmm.
It’s easy to fall in love with the idea of yourself as all powerful and never breaking.
With feeling, knowing that this thing didn’t break me either.
Until you need help.
Until you have that day where you are walking down the hallway to your apartment, quietly weeping, and you’re two doors down but you can’t take it any more. And you lean up against the wall and just wail at the top of your lungs.
Hoping that you will frighten someone into shooting you in the head because you can’t take it for one more second.
Until you are at the same time petrified that you will be found somewhere, gone mad, in need of the help you’re allowed to ask for if you’re not black (you freeloader) or the help you’re allowed to ask for if you’re not a woman (you weak bitch) or the help you’re not allowed to ask for when you are temporarily broke or permanently poor (you Obamacare, food stamp defrauding, welfare begging, quota queen).
Oh yes it’s all fun and games right up until they catch you slippin’.
You NEED help.
When you position yourself as strong, as society’s definition of the strong loner who can get along by herself, the prophecy is fulfilled.
You don’t need anyone, so you become an island and you have no one.
You don’t reach out when anyone is there, so one day there is no one there.
You are so independent that you find yourself seceded from the union of humanity.
You’ll have no idea how to make that first phone call. To explain to your mother why you crawl up the stairs instead of walk. What are words? How is help?
Oh, the pruny heartache of triplicated shame.
At first it will feel like failure…
When you collect the leftover samples of your bones before you on the ground it will seem like you have failed.
You are not the picture of health.
You are not some elegant panther, glistening in the night.
Pedestals crumble.
But somewhere on the road back, you’ll see that the version of being mighty and powerful and unstoppable, this black woman superhero? It’s just another fairy tale. You’ve been hoodwinked and bamboozled, girl.
For there is real power in letting yourself be a human.
One who bleeds and cries and hurts sometimes.
One who does not need to feel obligated to hide pain as if it were a personal shame that you don’t hold the voodoo version of percocet and prozac somewhere in your melanin.
If you admit to that pain… if you can give yourself permission to sometimes fold in it… if you allow yourself to cry and be bewildered sometimes…
You find yourself untethered to outward notions of who you’re meant to be.
Then you get to make the rules.
And you can then take care of yourself, because you went to others who helped you heal. You won’t have to run on empty anymore because you are no longer a fountain filling only others. Now you have a wellspring for yourself, rooted in reciprocity and love.
And you can build a foundation to grow. Or continue to recover. Maybe flourish.
Then you find that the ultimate strength? Is in not attempting to be this picture of strength at all.
You’ll make way more beautiful muscles just learning how to Be.
Tinu you envelop & share truth like no other.
Thank you. What I’m hoping is that this will start a dialogue about how it’s become acceptable, if accidental, to marginalize people’s pain by ascribing this label of independence or strength. It’s as if the right to experience one’s own humanity is not permitted.
Agreed
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Thanks for sharing, great piece. Some folks find solace from their pain in drugs, alcohol and unsafe sex. So many, too many, don’t know where to get help for whatever their issue may be. Then there are those who have been abused and misused by those who would hurt them. Life can be tough and it ain’t for the faint of heart. We have to fight to live our lives on our terms. It takes strength of character and will.
Indeed. Of course one of the points I was trying to make is that these events that we need strength for are also often what will make us strong – we may be weak going in, in character, emotionally, mentally… It’s important to find support if we can.
Amen. It’s such a balance. Compartmentalizing and forging ahead…or being vulnerable and opening yourself up – to pain, to reality, to a bad moment. You are right that it takes strength to be vulnerable. What is the Nigerian equivalent of “Keeping up with the Joneses?” Let’s not do that. Let’s not put on the facade of “everything is great.” I think some people don’t want to “burden” others with their pain. I feel honored when those in my circle share with me.
I don’t know that there’s a Nigerian version because there’s just too many cultural groups in Nigeria I can’t speak to on this, or that I know for a fact differ somewhere on this point due to religious or other reasons.
For Yorubas I can say that Keeping up with the Joneses is so prevalent it would be faster to explain when it’s NOT a thing (at least those who are cultural Yorubas, rather than religious worshippers of the Orishas).
I agree we shouldn’t do that. At the same time, this is a delicate and complicated thing. I think of my parents and the generation before them, and often struggle to talk about some of these topics without hurting them, in a way that is sensitive to their struggle and the things they did for us.
I try to put myself in their shoes where you are raised with the notion of a thing as normal, pass it on to your kids, make it into a more privileged class and circumstance, and then watch your kids reject part of what motivated you to get where you are.
There’s a relationship between the Yoruba and Ibo drive for excellence for second generation Nigerian Americans, and the idea of being better. On the one hand there are areas where we are pushing or were pushed too hard – we lost things in our mandated full court press to be on top of the world. At the same time we fight the shame of the climate in Nigeria for our less fortunate counterparts, where there’s this notion of crime or starve. It’s so bad that a lot of common scams are attributed to Nigerians and people just believe it.
To tie this back to being strong. There are two culture issues at play. One is not airing your dirty laundry in front of certain people (which people varies a bit so I won’t get into that), the second is yes, burdening other people with your pain.
The funny thing is – no one ever said “don’t burden people with your pain” the way my parents said “face your books, you aren’t here to find out why people call somebody african booty scratcher.” I got that from the reactions of people to my previous ills, and my own notion of what love is.
It took turning 40, and giving several less fucks of what people think, to get me to a place where I could share my pain – and of course, realizing how I feel when people I love share with me.
Yeah it’s partly not wanting to burden people, it’s partly the culture in your head, that one time someone said “you’re not sick, you’re just fat and lazy” or “maybe if you lose weight” when being sick is how you got this overweight.
I’m trying to be better. But it IS OVER 49 years of programming being overcome…