The Woman Who Has Been Strong for Too Long

You know her. You may well be her. She is the one everyone leans on, the one who simply handles things, the friend others call in a crisis who has somehow never quite worked out who she is meant to call in her own. She is endlessly capable, and she is tired in a way that sleep does not seem to touch.

Competence becomes a cage

It usually begins as a virtue, and often as a survival skill. Perhaps she learned early that things went more smoothly when she held them together, that being the strong one earned love, or kept the peace, or simply got the work done when no one else would. So she became good at it. Very good. The trouble with being the strong one is that the role tends to harden around you over time. The better you cope, the more coping quietly gets handed to you. People stop asking whether you are all right, because you reliably are. The strength that once protected her slowly becomes a job she can never clock out of.

The bill the body keeps

There is a real physiological cost to running on high alert for years, and the body keeps a careful, running total of it. Researchers describe the slow wear that builds up when the stress response rarely gets to switch all the way off, the low and constant hum of being responsible for everything and braced for whatever needs handling next. This is why the tiredness of the over-functioning woman is not ordinary tiredness. It is the exhaustion of a nervous system that has been on duty for a very long time with no real relief. You cannot nap your way out of it, because the problem was never a single bad night of sleep. It is the accumulated weight of always being the one who carries.

Strong and unheld at the same time

Here is the ache underneath it, the part that rarely gets said out loud. A great many strong women are deeply unsupported, precisely because they look as though they need nothing at all. Their competence renders them invisible as people who might be quietly struggling. They become a safe harbour for everyone around them, and somehow a port that no ship ever thinks to pull into. Like many women, their instinct under stress bends toward tending and befriending, toward caring for others the moment things get hard, and that lovely instinct can become a way of never once turning the care back toward themselves.

Putting it down is not the same as dropping it

The fear, almost always, is that if she stops holding it all, everything will fall apart. Sometimes a little of it does wobble, and the world keeps turning regardless. More often she discovers that the people around her are far more capable than her over-functioning ever allowed them to prove, and that letting someone help is a gift to them every bit as much as a relief to her. Setting something down is not the same as letting it smash on the floor. It is allowing it to be held by more than one pair of hands, or simply resting it on the ground for a while, so that your arms can remember what it feels like to be empty.

A quieter, harder kind of strength

There is another strength available to her, and it is far harder won than the obvious kind. It is the strength to say I am not okay to someone safe, to let a need be seen, to stop auditioning for love through usefulness and discover that she was never actually being graded in the first place. She was never required to be strong every hour of her life. She was always, all along, allowed to be held. The bravest thing she may ever do is let that turn out to be true.