A Strength You Did Not Know You Had
I look back at the year and let myself see how steady I have been. The steadiness is the whole proof.
You did not feel strong at the beginning of this year. You may not have felt strong yesterday. The word "strength," when offered to you, may have sounded almost insulting — as if anyone could be choosing this, as if it were a quality you had decided to perform — as if it were not just the daily, exhausted work of staying alive inside something that was trying to undo you.
Look quietly at what you have done anyway.
You got up, on the mornings when not getting up would have been the easier thing. You made the meal for the child in your life, on the days when you yourself could not eat. You went to the therapy appointment, even when you did not believe it would help. You answered the email that needed answering. You said the small honest thing in the conversation that asked for it. You walked the dog. You washed the dishes. You folded the laundry. You moved through the small ordinary architecture of a life on the days when the whole architecture wanted to collapse.
That is the strength. Not anything dramatic. The slow, daily, often-invisible persistence of continuing to be a person inside a season that was trying to make you something less than a person. The light that has been on the whole time — that you sometimes did not know was on — was you. You were keeping it. You were always keeping it.
The proof of this strength is the page in front of you right now. You are reading it. You are here. You have arrived at Day 332 of a year you were not sure you would survive. That arrival is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the largest thing — the bedrock fact on which everything else is built.
You can let yourself know this. You can let the small private knowing live in you. The strength is not theoretical. The whole year is the proof.