I was the strong one for most of my adult life. The one who kept going. The one who didn't fall apart in front of people. The one everyone brought their problems to because I seemed to know what to do with them.
Some of us handled the hard things by becoming so extraordinarily useful to everyone around us that we never had to look at our own boxes.
Some of us handled it by making ourselves very, very quiet.
And some of us handled it by going on a seventeen-year spiritual journey that has so far resulted in no external change whatsoever.
But here we are. Everything life has thrown at us — we handled it. Not always elegantly. But we handled it.
The work is not to stop being strong. The work is to discover that you can be both — strong and supported, capable and cared for, resilient and real. Not one or the other. Both at the same time.
That's what coming home to yourself actually looks like.