Strength For A Reason

A not so brief note on what it means to be strong and deciding how strong we are

I’ve been thinking about this essay for a long time, years probably, but it feels like now is the right time to write it so here goes.

For a long time I’ve been “strong”.  This doesn’t mean that I can lift a lot of weight (although I kinda can) or win a lot of physical fights (although while I generally don’t like fighting I kinda can).  For as long as I can remember I’ve had to be the kind of strong that people tell you to be when a family member is sick or you’ve suffered a lot of disappointments in a row or, you know, the world is on fire in an existential, and sometimes literal, way.  It’s a thing I learned at a young age, managing keeping things together while my parents bitterly fought and various members of my family fell victim to addictions of various kinds.  By the time I was graduating high school my mother had gone in to rehab for alcohol and my sister, 5 years my younger, was on her way in to a crippling drug problem that would spiral for decades to come.  In the face of these things my father responded with resentment and withdrawal.  This meant that a lot of the operation of keeping a household fell to my dumb, 19 year old ass.

None of this is said in an effort to garner sympathy, mind you, just for context.  I feel like I need to supply context because increasingly people offer platitudes on things that they’ve never really dealt with and I want to be clear that everything I’m going to say here is from a place of experience. 

A funny thing about emotional strength, more so I’d imagine than physical strength, is how much of a burden it can feel like sometimes.  It can grow to feel like it’s expected of you and that can make you want to neglect the reflex to step up and display your strength.  Many times the upsetting and disappointing caveat to showing up for people you love is that often the reason you have to step up is a reason that, for reasons which are usually outside of the control of most people involved, the person you’re showing up for, or the community you’re showing up for, is in a crisis which negates their ability to acknowledge your work in the moment.  This doesn’t meant there isn’t gratitude, although I’d be lying if I said there always is, it just means that the nature of that moment doesn’t it lend itself to the expression of the gratitude that more often than not is there but not able to be expressed at the time.  This can be frustrating, it can make you wonder why you’ve given your time and effort, your love and care, to something that doesn’t seem to honor the things you’ve sacrificed or the work you’ve put in.  It can grow to feel like an expectation rather than a gift. 

It can also be frustrating because many times in these scenarios there is a lot to be done and it’s incremental so you don’t get to see the fruits of your work the same way you would get to if you were displaying a feat of physical strength.  When you deadlift 300 pounds, it’s obvious to everyone looking.  When you’ve swallowed your pride in an effort to help someone who has hurt your heart because you still care and know that whatever pain they inflicted upon you is a microcosm of the pain they’re currently experiencing, there’s no way to post that to your Instagram stories.  There’s no group of dudes, dudettes or the NB equivalent to say “wow, look at those gains”.  It’s a thing that requires that you operate many times in the shadows.  

A thought I’ve had a lot of recently that is a thing that should be, and will be, fleshed out more in its’ own right is that a thing I’ve noticed turned a lot of folks who were previously pretty decent in to unfeeling trolls and monsters is that the level of thanks they got wasn’t satisfactory to them.  That’s not to say they didn’t get any thanks but it wasn’t enough to feed their ego.  At the risk of making an assumption here, many of these people were white men who felt like whatever effort they put in to helping women or people of color wasn’t celebrated enough.  Sure, they were thanked but they weren’t treated like the white knights they expected to be lauded as and that hardened their hearts.  They decided that if they weren’t going to be celebrated they were going to do a complete 180 and become the very people they had previously tried to rescue people from.  They were going to make their impression felt one way or another.

And I get that to a degree.  It’s hard to exist in a context beyond yourself.  I really battled with it.  I fucking hated the word strong.  For a while I quietly resented the impulse to help people and told myself that if they were going to take that for granted I was just going stop doing it. It was so strange because what so many people viewed as an admirable and valuable trait began to feel like an ever tightening noose around my own neck.  I wrestled with my reflexes to step up, in no small part because I felt like that’s all I was in many people’s eyes.  It can, bizarrely, feel very lonely being a person that people look to for reassurance and kindness, for guidance or support.  A thing I became strangely envious of was the ability of people I knew to operate entirely in selfish place.  I envied the sociopaths and the grinders who didn’t care who they disappointed because they were so focused on their personal advancement.  I wished I could just shut off my empathy and step on whoever I needed to in order to get the things I wanted.  I watched as people who took the wrong lesson from every hardship trampled over things I cared about and then carefully walked behind and helped clean up the wreckage.  I became jealous of people who were performative in their actions, I wished I had spent more time shining a spotlight on myself and my efforts.  I battled with knowing whether or not I was content being their for people in their times of need without erecting a giant flashing sign saying “HEY LOOK EVERYBODY!!  I’M BEING A GOOD GUY!!” 

Ultimately though, I knew that wasn’t who I was or who I ever really wanted to be.  I knew in my heart of hearts that I could never stop being there for people even if they didn’t loudly appreciate it because I’m not just in this for myself.  Part of being strong, I think both physically and mentally, is deciding why you’re doing it.  Empathy, like other muscles, can serve a variety of purposes and at some point you have to decide how you want to use it and then work towards your goals from there.  I decided that what was more important to me than being seen by the world at large as a “person who helps” was doing the helping and letting that be end of it.  If people said thank you, that was great but sometimes things are too fucked up for people to acknowledge how fucked up they are.  Sometimes you have to help people who don’t even really want to be helped, or even know that they are.  One time I got off the train after work to visit my parents and found my sister passed out from an overdose and carried her from the 96^th street train station to the Mount Sinai ER.  Nobody ever knew how she got there, and I never volunteered that information. In fact, until I wrote this down right now the only person I ever told was my therapist.  It would have been so easy to say “It was me!  I did that!  I saved your life.  Mom and dad I saved your daughter’s life” but I’ve never been good at being in the spotlight, so I just went about my days.  Again, this is not for sympathy but for context.  I’ve reckoned with it, otherwise I wouldn’t be putting it on a webpage for strangers and friends alike to read.  Ultimately the best part of helping people is helping people.  Thanks and rewards are nice but true strength, I feel, comes from not getting beaten down by the fact that sometimes you won’t get those things.  It’s the difference between full body workouts versus working on your vanity muscles.  It’s nice to get oooh-ed and aaah-ed over but in my mind what’s even better is being able to clear a path and help lift the people you care about to a safer spot, even if you’re night all oiled up and shimmery.

So why did I write all this today?  Why, after months of threatening to start writing again have I finally decided to follow through on that threat?  Well, because sadly we find ourselves in a moment that is going to require a lot of strength from a lot of people.  There going to be a lot of people hurting in the coming days, weeks, months and years and there are going to be a lot of people who make a show of offering to help but are doing it for their own reasons.  Some will do so to try to have a bargaining chip for something down the line, others will do it for the recognition and thanks and how good being thanked makes them feel.  Others will quietly work.  Some will organize and others will cheerlead.  Some of our strongest will stumble, not for lack of desire but simply because you cannot help people swim if you yourself are drowning.  Others who never saw strength within will find themselves thrust in to moments that requires it and will be able to help lift more than they ever though they could. Some people will have to find the strength to declare who they are in a time when doing so requires an ever increasing level of bravery.  Others will have to support them as they strive forward.  We will have to step up for our neighbors in new and intensifying ways, and in many cases while we will be able to feel the warmth of our work, the moment may not allow us to stop and thank people the way we wish we could in real time.  Ultimately, a time has come to decide for ourselves how much we are willing to fight alongside one another and once we’ve made that decision, depending on what we come up with, we may have to dig down deep in our reserves and pull strength we may not need.  From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.