WHEN YOU REALISE YOU’RE DONE BEING STRONG

It’s difficult to admit exhaustion when you’ve spent years believing strength is the only option you have. When your life has been moving in one direction for so long, you can miss how quietly it begins to fall apart, and how you start shrinking, bending, and sacrificing yourself just to keep the peace.

Somewhere along the way, you forget to ask what you need.

I thought it was best to carry what he wouldn’t, for the children, for stability, for the image of a life that looked “fine” from the outside.
Mother. Daughter. Colleague. Friend.
Wife (even if only for show).

I mistook endurance for strength. I mistook silence for peace.
But the truth has a way of finding you, even when you’ve buried it deep.

The lies we whisper internally:
the I’m fine,
the this is just a phase,
the I can hold this together if I try harder.
They are the ones that break us the fastest.

Despite my best attempts to avoid the cracks, everything eventually collapsed.
I became a shadow of the woman I once knew: scared, anxious, hypervigilant, exhausted.

So I gathered what mattered most, and I left. I often wonder if it would have been easier to stay as my shadow became weaker. All I know is that for me, to heal is to:

• Surround yourself with like-minded, authentic people.
• Know your worth.
• Don’t apologise unless you truly believe you’ve done something wrong.
• Notice the glimmers—every single day.

“Strength feels impossible when you’re out of alignment.
But effortless when you return to truth.”

Strength becomes unbearable when you’re carrying a life that’s not yours.
But when you return to authenticity, to truth, strength becomes something else entirely.

It becomes light.
It becomes ease.
It becomes yours again