We watched our grandmothers, mothers embody resilience in its most silent form. Women who endured, sacrificed, held families together without ever focusing on their own needs. We watched them move through life with a quiet toughness, pushing past exhaustion, heartbreak and pressure without pausing to be held. We saw our aunts do the same, our sisters learn it early and right in front of us we perform it daily.
You may not see it immediately because we are so busy with the education, climbing the corporate ladder, the business and if you are like me juggling all that with marriage some have children to raise so bafazi we all going through it. Still the very same pattern we grew up seeing is somehow no different to how we show up in our daily lives.
We hold everything and everyone together with grace that almost feels practiced. We go through life being the strong but beneath that we are tired. Not the kind of tired that sleeps fixes, it’s the kind of tired that comes from years of carrying , containing, suppressing and surviving.
The truth is, this version of strength did not start with us, we inherited it. We watched it long before we understood it. Strength as it was modelled to us looked like silence, like endurance and not falling apart. And so we learned.
We are becoming woman who can handle anything.
While that is not a bad thing, we rarely find women who feel safe enough to say ‘’I can’t handle this right now’’. You might be one of those women right now who is genuinely tired because exhaustion lies in silence. Being the strong woman is not just an identity, it’s a performance. I’ve performed the strong woman so often that it became my identity because the woman who doesn’t break is celebrated and rewarded. But no one really asks what it costs her.
No one talks about the loneliness of always being the one to rely on, the pressure of never wanting to disappoint anyone. The quiet moments where everything feels like too much to handle but you don’t even know how to ask for less. There is a grief that comes with this role. The grief of not being seen fully, the grief of not being held in the same way you hold others. The grief of realising that somewhere along the way you became everything for everyone and left very little room to just be yourself.
And if we are being truly honest, many of us don’t know who we are without this identity. Because we’ve never been given or gave ourselves permission to be anything else. We were not raised seeing women say ‘I need a break’( most of us ). So now when we ask our bodies to slow down, when our emotions ask to be felt and when our spirits ask for gentleness, it feels unfamiliar. Even uncomfortable.
We don’t have to carry strength the same way our grandmothers, mothers and women we look up to did/do. Not because we are ungrateful for their strength but because we understand that evolution is part of honouring them. We can redefine strength and expand it. We can make room for a kind of strength that includes truth. Real strength is not about how much you can hold in, it’s about how honest you are willing to be.
It’s saying I’m overwhelmed, it’s allowing yourself to cry without rushing to fix and it’s definitely setting boundaries without guilt. Letting go of the strong woman facade is not weak, it is you becoming whole and releasing that pressure to perform. Allow yourself to experience life, fully, honestly and sometimes messily.
Don’t function, live. Because the strongest woman in the room is no longer the one who appears unbreakable. She is the one who tells the truth.
Nolo Nawaya
