People keep telling me I'm "so strong" for how I've handled the last 2 years alone and I want to tell them that strength is just what it looks like when you have no other option and no one to hand the weight to

"You're so strong," my neighbor said yesterday, touching my arm gently as I collected my mail. "I don't know how you've managed everything these past two years on your own."

I smiled and thanked her, because what else do you do? But walking back to my empty house, her words echoed in that hollow way compliments sometimes do when they don't quite land right. Strong. That word again.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has called me strong since my husband died, I could probably afford the therapy to process why that word makes me want to scream into a pillow.

Here's what I want to tell them, what I want to tell you: strength isn't some noble quality I've cultivated through meditation and green smoothies. Strength is what it looks like when you have no other option and no one to hand the weight to.

It's not a choice. It's survival dressed up in its Sunday best so the world doesn't have to see how desperately you're treading water.

When survival masquerades as strength

After my second husband passed away following seven years of Parkinson's, I spent six months barely leaving the house. Was that strength?

Some days, just getting out of bed and making coffee felt like climbing Everest in flip-flops. I'd stand in my kitchen at 2 PM, still in yesterday's clothes, staring at a sink full of dishes and wondering if this was what drowning on dry land felt like.

But bills don't stop arriving because you're grieving. The lawn doesn't stop growing because you can't bear to hear the lawnmower that reminds you of Saturday mornings when he used to cut the grass while you made breakfast.

Life keeps demanding things from you, even when you have nothing left to give.

So you get up. You wash the dishes. You pay the bills. You mow the lawn. Not because you're strong, but because the alternative is letting everything collapse, and then you'd have grief AND chaos to deal with. When people see you functioning, they call it strength. I call it having no other option.

The mythology of the strong woman

There's this mythology we've created around strong women, isn't there? We're supposed to be these titanium-spined creatures who can weather any storm with grace and a fresh coat of lipstick.

But let me tell you something about being a "strong woman" - it's exhausting, and it's lonely, and sometimes it feels like a prison built from other people's expectations.

I learned this lesson years ago during my fifteen years as a single mother. People would marvel at how I managed it all - working full-time, raising kids, keeping a home. "I don't know how you do it," they'd say, as if I'd discovered some secret formula.

The truth? I did it because my children needed to eat, needed clothes, needed a mother who showed up. For two years, I swallowed my pride and accepted food stamps because feeding my kids mattered more than my ego.

Was that strength, or was it just math? Kids need food. Food costs money. No money means finding another way.

What would have happened if I hadn't been "strong"? Would my children have understood if I'd said, "Sorry, kids, Mommy's not feeling particularly strong today, so dinner's canceled"? The very question is absurd, which is why calling it strength feels like missing the point entirely.

The weight that has nowhere else to go

Have you ever held something heavy for so long that your arms start shaking, but you can't put it down because there's nowhere to set it? That's what the past two years have felt like.

Every decision, every responsibility, every moment of fear or sadness or overwhelming frustration - it all stays with you because there's no one to hand it to.

When my husband was sick, at least we carried the weight together. Even when he couldn't physically help, he was there. We could look at each other across the dinner table and share that silent understanding that yes, this is hard, but we're in it together.

Now, the dinner table is just me and whatever book I'm pretending to read while I eat.

The cruel irony is that the very aloneness that makes everything harder is also what people interpret as strength. They see you carrying all that weight by yourself and think you must be incredibly strong to manage it. They don't realize that you're only carrying it because there's literally no one else to help.

It's not strength; it's just physics. The weight exists. Someone has to carry it. You're the only someone available.

Why accepting help feels impossible when you need it most

Here's something I wrote about in a previous post that I think bears repeating: learning to ask for help isn't weakness, it's wisdom. I learned this as a single mother, but somehow forgot it after my husband died.

Maybe it's because widowhood feels different from divorce. Maybe it's because at my age, everyone else seems to be dealing with their own heavy loads. Or maybe it's because when you've been labeled "strong" enough times, you start feeling like you have to live up to it.

When you're seen as the strong one, asking for help feels like admitting you've been fraudulent all along. It's as if you're revealing that behind the curtain, there's no mighty Oz, just a tired woman who hasn't changed her sheets in three weeks because even that feels overwhelming.

But you know what? Sometimes strength isn't about carrying everything yourself. Sometimes it's about having the courage to say, "I can't do this alone," even when the world expects you to.

Sometimes it's about letting people see that you're not actually that strong, that you've just been making it look that way because you didn't know what else to do.

Final thoughts

If you're reading this and nodding along, if you've been called "strong" so many times it's lost all meaning, I want you to know something: it's okay to not be strong. It's okay to admit that you're not handling things well, that you're barely surviving, that some days you're held together with caffeine and sheer stubbornness.

Your survival isn't strength - it's human. We do what we must when we have no other choice. That doesn't make us heroes or titans. It makes us people doing our best with impossible circumstances.

And maybe, just maybe, if we could all stop calling it strength and start calling it what it is - getting by when life gives us no alternative - we might feel less pressure to pretend we've got it all together when we're actually falling apart.