When do you give up on yourself?

When do you give up on yourself? When do you finally give up listening to people who tell you to “stay strong”? I tried looking up articles or blogs on Google but far too many people think differently than I do.

Like the woman with dyspraxia whose blog is called Keep Being Strong. She believes she is not different than anyone else, with dyspraxia as her ‘quirk’ which adds to her rather than being her. I still feel I am very different from many people I know – my aphasia is me.

Or The Shy Speaker’s Guide to Success blog – I understand his feelings about his sick mother, but his thoughts aren’t mine. Some of them were close – he said “I’ve been learning to cope throughout this tumultuous journey. Mainly with the support and encouragement of my friends, relatives and mentor who have rightly told me to ‘be strong’” - but not enough.

Or the woman who wrote a post titled The Unbearable Heaviness of Being A Strong Woman. She said, early in it, that “We think that to be strong women, we must pour out endlessly, we must spend of ourselves, sometimes until nothing is left. But many of us continue to do so, long past when our reserves have run dry, because we think we have something to prove. Because we don’t see that our strength is in our skin and not our armor, in our love and not our fear.” I agreed with her and then had to disagree with her for my own beliefs.

Or the The Life Me Blog, saying “Somehow I developed the misconception that being strong and smart meant that I always had to feel and act strong and smart. I had this idea that I couldn’t let people see my greatest weaknesses or else they might question my strength.” I agreed with that! Yet she finished her blog saying that “Listen, you grab life by the balls and start fighting back with all you’ve got!”, when I even doubt what I still have!

Or the woman who said in her post that The Greatest Weakness of Strong Women can come from something different. “This was an incredible lesson for me. We strong women often feel we need to tough it out on our own. We forget to give others the gift of letting them help us.” She wrote about feelings at work. At work I used to feel the same as she had, and I would have learned from what she said. Now I don’t.

Jo Kirker, with whom I had contacted through LinkedIn and who helped me when I had an expressive depression at my previous ‘home’, has a blogspot on her website. The post that really got me is called What makes a woman strong? Jo had asked ‘what characterises a strong woman’ and got many answers. This one I understood: “I guess strength is only ever noticed or tested at tough times. When we are in a comfortable situation, it is hidden or dormant. Or is it another way of saying we are managing stress, coping etc. Is it something we only recognise by an absence of other external signs of stress?” 

That’s pretty much how I feel.

I was called ‘strong’ for many years. At school. After school. After rape. At work. In the Army. Pre-marriage. After marriage. Solo parenting. Pre-second-marriage. Moving to Aus. As WHS advisor. After-second-marriage. Pre brain aneurysm surgery. Those years ground to a stop on 22^nd April 2014 when I had the brain aneurysm surgery and the stroke during that. I had aphasia – and I didn’t even remember what ‘strong’ meant.

The 22^nd of the month isn’t good any more. I got the result from QIRC on 22^nd April 2016. I didn’t win. I met a Logan Council person about a possible job on 22^nd September 2016. It didn’t happen. I hit the bottom of depression when my previous home illegally kicked me out and I attempted suicide on 22^nd November 2016. I left my BFF dog, Jordie, with my daughter – I thought she would look after her and make whatever last decision Jordie needed. I didn’t die. My ex was due to come over here on 22^nd August to pay me off and finally (4 years too late!) get my divorce through. He cancelled. His excuse, my loss. That wasn’t ‘strong’ from me.

It’s too long with all that happening to me. 22^nd. After recovery from my attempted suicide I took the idiom ‘bit between my teeth’ and I fought the property manager. I still am.

22^nd. Why is this date working against me? I am no longer a ‘strong’ woman. I can’t win anything since my brain aneurysm surgery, since my stroke with aphasia. Yes, I know I can get over my depression. Yes, I know I love and look after my BFF dog. Yes, I know I love and need music and joined the Streetbeat and choir teams from SOHK. The comment I had found in Jo’s post had said being a ‘strong woman’ could be “another way of saying we are managing stress, coping”. Yet I can’t even do that these days. I shut myself away from people because I feel that, if they don’t know about me, I’m okay. 

I found a quote which was not acknowledged to whoever had said it: that’s in the pic at the start of this post and acknowledged by me as “Anonymous”, and it seems to be where I am. “Strength is nothing more than how well you hide the pain.” Some days I can’t hide my pain, my depression, my anguish. My contempt of the 22^nd of the month (why is that doing anything against me??).

Probably tomorrow I’ll get over this latest feeling. Maybe I’ll start to think positively about where I will be in the near future. Maybe I’ll have caught up on sleep. Maybe my cold will have gone.

Maybe I’ll be ‘strong’ again. One day.