Not Weak
I’ve worn the weight of silence, a childhood stitched with shadows, a body stitched with pain. My veins remember the stroke, how time stopped, rewound, and never quite played the same again.
I am not weak—
I’ve worn the weight of silence,
a childhood stitched with shadows,
a body stitched with pain.
My veins remember the stroke,
how time stopped, rewound, and
never quite played the same again.
I am not weak—
I’ve walked through long COVID haze,
the endless screaming of my nerves,
the chaos of a world that never waits.
I’ve carried endometriosis like a wound
no one sees but always bleeds,
and still, I rise.
I am not weak—
I’ve faced the mirrors of memory,
watched the cracks in glass
from voices that tried to break me,
their words like falling shards.
But I am still here,
piecing myself together from fragments,
sharper, stronger.
I am not weak—
I am the burn of resilience,
the quiet storm that rebuilds,
the soft and jagged edges of a woman
who knows what survival costs.
I am not weak—
I am a galaxy
revolving on a tired axis,
my light bending but not breaking.
This, too, is strength.
This, too, is power.
This, too, is me.
I am celebrating Christmas for the first time in Spain, surrounded by my husband’s family. The warmth here is different—not just the sunshine spilling through the windows, but the kind that lingers in laughter and shared plates at the table. It feels strange to be so at peace, to let my guard down enough to truly exist in the moment.
And yet, even here, my body reminds me of its limits. It whispers in the heaviness behind my eyes, the ache in my joints, the fatigue that follows even the simplest of interactions. I’ve carried this weight for so long—neurodivergence, the lingering shadows of long COVID, endometriosis wrapping itself around my insides, and the stroke I survived at nineteen, which carved an invisible line between me and who I used to be.
For years, I believed that needing rest meant weakness. That slowing down or stepping back was failure. The world taught me that, with its endless demands and its sharp-edged judgments. But sitting here, watching my husband laugh with his family, I see something else. Strength doesn’t always look like forward motion. Sometimes, it’s found in stillness. In choosing to nurture yourself when the world says to push harder.
Weakness is ignoring your body’s cries for help. Strength is knowing when to listen. And here, surrounded by love and light, I realize I’m still learning to listen—to honor the resilience it takes to simply keep going. To exist in a world that has tried, again and again, to break me. I am not weak. I am here, and that is enough.