They Call Me Strong. Some Days I Borrow It

Someone called me resilient again last week.

She meant it as a compliment, I know that. She said it with warmth and admiration, the way people do when they see a woman holding everything together and assume the holding comes naturally.

I smiled. I said thank you. And somewhere on the inside, a quiet voice said, if only you knew. This is the thing nobody tells you about being the strong one. It comes with a kind of loneliness that is hard to explain. People stop asking if you’re okay because they assume you always are. The very first time I heard something like this was from my mother, the youngest of her 6 children and I was in Junior High School (13 or 14 years old). She was making a decision and believed that I was strong enough to manage myself and the possible implications of her decision….. I guess it was from that point in my life that the ‘cloak of strength’ quietly became second nature.

They lean on you because you’ve never visibly broken. And you let them, because the alternative is admitting that some days, the strength they see in you is borrowed. Rented. Held together with prayer and sheer will and the fear of what falls apart if you don’t. In the last 12 years, I have heard variations of this ‘attribute’ and fact is on some days, I don’t recognize the woman they are describing. Me? Debbie? Strong? Resilient? Brave? Wooooo, hold up!

I am Debbie Mangortey. I advocate for the inclusion of persons with disability. I run KEY Therapy Drive (you will hear more of this in the coming posts, soon). I show up for my children, my community, my work. And I believe from the outside, I imagine it looks like a woman who has figured something out.

From the inside, however, there are days that it has been, and continues to be, one of the hardest and suffocating journeys of my life.

I won’t detail everything here. Some chapters are still too close, too tender to lay fully open. What I will say is that the last few years brought changes I didn’t plan for, in my health, in my family, in the quiet architecture of the life I thought I was building. And through most of it, I kept showing up. Kept smiling. Kept being the person everyone expected me to be.

And I have felt like a complete fraud every single time someone called me strong. Because the truth is, I seem to have my moments of constant fear, doubt, anxiety, even borderline depression….the ever present desire to just be Debbie with all my quirks and without the persona of strength.

I have felt like a complete fraud every single time someone called me strong…

So what actually keeps me going? I’ve thought about this honestly. On the days when the inspiration runs dry and the resilience feels like a costume I’m tired of wearing, three things remain:

The first is my children (and therefore the people who believe in me unwaveringly). The fear of disappointing them, of them looking back one day and seeing a mother (a friend) who gave up, is stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. They are watching. So I keep going.

The second is the knowledge of how far I have come. There are versions of me from over the years and seasons ago who would not believe where I am standing today. When the present feels unbearable I try to look backwards, not with regret, but with evidence. Evidence that I have survived hard things before. Evidence that I am still here, I am still going, one day at a time.

The third is hope. Simple, stubborn, sometimes irrational hope that this season is not permanent. That it won’t always feel like this. That morning comes.

And when all three of those fail me, when the children are asleep and the evidence feels thin and hope feels like a word someone else owns, I find my way to water. To the beach. To a waterfall. To a green hillside or a lush stretch of terrain where the world is bigger than my problems and the air moves differently and something in me remembers how to breathe…..because I see and feel God, Asaase Yaa, Otwediampong Nyankopong, Nyɔŋmɔ Oboade, the Higher Being

Nature has saved me more times than I can count. Last Saturday, I picked up a paintbrush for the first time in a while. I painted a woman sitting alone by the water, caught between a stormy sky and a golden light surrounded by flowers and I called it ‘Grief and Gratitude’. It won the category of ‘most inspiring work’. I think it won because it is true, because most of us are living in both at the same time, whether we admit it or not.

To anyone reading this who also wears the ‘strong one’ badge (doesn’t matter how you came to be wearing such):

You are allowed to not be okay. You are allowed to borrow the strength some days. You are allowed to find your beach, your hillside, your quiet place — and stay there until you’re ready to come back.

Resilience is not the absence of struggle. It is the decision to keep going in spite of it. And some days, that decision is the bravest thing any of us will ever do. And maybe, just maybe, strength is NOT in how much we carry, but in finally admitting when the weight is heavy.

I see you🧡.
Debbie

Strength is not in how much we carry, but in finally admitting when the weight is heavy.