I have lived my life in half breaths for the past 13 years. A few long sighs here and there.

You see, strength isn’t what they say it is. It’s not loud, not always noble. It doesn’t come with medals, or claps, or even a soft pat on the back. Sometimes, strength is just silence- the heavy kind that wraps around your throat and keeps you from screaming.

When the world talks about strength, it’s always about survival. About pushing through. About resilience. But rarely do we talk about what it costs. We rarely speak of the quiet destruction that follows years of holding yourself together.

I was 13 when I first learned what it meant to “be strong”. A phrase thrown like a life jacket in moments of grief, chaos, and confusion. I wore it like an armour, thinking it would save me. Instead, it began to suffocate me.

The truth is, strength teaches you how to endure, but not how to rest. It teaches you how to carry pain, but not how to let it go. It tells you to smile when your world is burning, and clap for others while you bleed quietly behind closed doors.

For 13 years, I perfected the art of “functioning.” I became someone who people admired for being composed. Who they praised for being mature, wise, “beyond my years.” But what they were really admiring was my ability to bury things. My strength was not healing — it was suppression.

And that’s the thing no one tells you:Strength, when misused, destroys you.Not with a bang, but with a slow, gnawing erosion of your softness. You begin to unlearn tenderness. You flinch at vulnerability. You forget how to cry without feeling weak.

You become so good at carrying pain that you forget how to set it down.

We live in a world that glorifies grit. That idolizes those who keep pushing. But I’ve come to believe that strength, real strength, isn’t about how much you can take.It’s about knowing when to stop.It’s about asking for help.It’s about letting yourself fall apart so you can rebuild, not rot.

Today, I am learning how to breathe again.Not half breaths. Not the quiet sighs of someone holding back tears.But deep, honest inhales that tell my body: you are safe now.

If you’ve been strong for too long, I see you.But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to put that weight down.Not everything you carry is meant to be yours forever.
Strength doesn’t have to destroy you.But it will, if you forget that you’re human first.

Sometimes, I wonder who I would have become if I hadn’t been strong.Would I have laughed louder? Loved easier? Asked for more? Would I have been softer — not weaker, just unguarded — like rain that doesn’t apologise for falling?
But strength hardened me. It taught me to anticipate disappointment, to lower expectations, to smile with gritted teeth. I became the dependable one, the emotionally mature one, the “rock” — and somewhere along the line, I stopped being seen as someone who also needed to be held.

That’s the other cruelty of strength — once you wear it long enough, people forget you’re wearing it at all.You become invisible in your own pain.
And when you finally crack — not break, just crack — it catches everyone off guard. They look at you with startled eyes, as if to say, “You too?”As if strength made you immune to feeling.As if survival was the same as living.
But surviving is not a personality trait.It’s an alarm bell.A sign that something within you has been screaming for a long time, but no one — not even you — stopped to listen.

So now, I’m trying something radical.I’m learning how to be gentle with myself.How to rest.How to grieve for the years I spent being strong instead of being free.How to forgive myself for all the versions of me that couldn’t ask for help.

Because real strength isn’t about suffering in silence.It’s about choosing yourself, even when it feels selfish.It’s about learning to live in full breaths — not just the sighs between disasters.
And if strength ever whispers again that I need to hold it all in, I’ll remind it:I am no longer a fortress. I am a field — open, wild, and growing.