Resilience is fucking exhausting.

Our strength is not our personality, nor should it have to be.

I know a lot of strong people. Strong women, especially.

And I can tell you: we are really fucking tired of being strong.

Mental and emotional toughness is deceptive in its fuckery because on the surface it feels like survival gear. We love to laud and celebrate the tough-minded, the thick-skinned, the ones who carry impossibly heavy burdens and look beautiful while they do it, showcasing just how well they handle every fucking ounce of that crushing weight on their backs.

When I was a kid, this bitch Gwynne used to bully me relentlessly. But she did it quietly, subversively, whispering cruel insults to me in the corners of the gym or doling out unkindness in the form of misplacing a party invitation for me that every other girl in the class received.

And parents and teachers alike all gave me the same advice. Rise above. Turn the other cheek. Ignore her. Don’t give her the satisfaction.

So I was taught from a really fucking young age that the antidote to cruelty and unkindness was to pretend it wasn’t there and to effectively reward it by never calling it out, never pointing loudly at its impact, never fucking holding a single person accountable for their poor treatment of others. Simply put, the job of being strong and resilient rested with the abused. Again. As always.

When I was nineteen, I was in a horrifically fucking abusive relationship. He controlled who I talked to and when. What I wore. He made me sleep in the fucking bathtub in our studio apartment when I’d displeased him. He took me to my classes on the college campus and picked me up and one day, when we got home and he didn’t like the way I’d looked at a man in the hallway of my business admin building, he took me home and backed me into the corner of our livingbedroom and screamed at me, purple in the face, about what an utter whore I was. I had to sleep in the bathtub for two nights after that transgression.

When I finally escaped that fucking nightmare, I was damaged. And when I told people what he did to me, most of them praised me for my strength.

My fucking strength. My endurance of abuse. My resilience in moving on with my life, as if I had any fucking choice. Yes, by all means, please give me a trophy for my fucking ferocity, I am woman, hear me roar and just ignore the fucking anguish that drives it out of my mouth from the wounded parts of my soul.

Shit is a hot mess out there right now. We’ve been in this pandemic for nearly two fucking years and millions of people are dead and we’re still being fucking strong. Our lives and work have been upended and we haven’t seen the people we love and some of us haven’t even had a proper fucking hug in many, many months but still, we’re strong. We’re unemployed and overwhelmed and isolated and afraid but look how fucking resilient we are. Racism and nationalism and hatriotism and weaponized religion are raging and still we fucking rise, or something.

I don’t really have anything profound to say today other than to tell you that if you’re tired of being fucking strong all the time, I see you.

If you’re exhausted and not sleeping and your body feels like you’ve run a marathon every time you manage to make it through a fucking day, I see you.

If your emotions are held together with duct tape and bailing twine and you plaster a smile-thats-more-of-a-grimace on your face to make sure the people around you can comfort themselves by knowing you’re okay when you’re absolutely not really fucking okay but you kind of have to be okay so they can be okay, I see you.

And if you’re the person constantly fucking glamorizing enduring resilience as if it’s not a wasting disease building scales on the tender backs of the endlessly beat down…fucking stop it. Now.

There is a Japanese art called kintsugi in which broken pottery is repaired with veins of precious metal. The belief is that the cracks and the damage are part of the object’s history, beauty, and story, and they should be celebrated as part of the art.

Strength is beautiful and it is fucking heartbreaking. It is necessary and it is insidious. It is powerful and it is exhausting.

May our cracks and damage be mended with the most beautiful of things, may our hearts heal enough today to hold fast again tomorrow, and may we all find peace in the constant quest for grace in our strength and remember that endurance is only as noble as the love, compassion, and humanity that greet us when we can endure no longer.

With love,

Amber