When the Glass Breaks, We Call That Strength.
I think this is the first time I’ve shared a personal story without carefully hiding it within the lines of a different topic. Today, my daughter, 13, fell down the stairs while carrying a glass. When she hit the ground, the glass fell from her hand and shattered around her. She wasn’t hurt, and no one was upset with her, but after a few minutes she started crying… and once she started, she couldn’t stop.
It wasn’t about the fall. It wasn’t about the broken glass. This cry was about everything she had been holding inside.
We do that, don’t we? More so as adults, we keep it together because life doesn’t slow down for us to process. We swallow our pain, push past our exhaustion, and convince ourselves we’re “fine."
But emotions don’t go away just because we ignore them.
They wait. And they build.
And then… one day, when everything is actually okay on the outside, something small unleashes a flood from the inside that we can’t hold back anymore.
My daughter is wise beyond her years, but still human. She didn’t understand why she was crying or why she couldn’t stop. And as amusing as it was to watch her laugh and cry at the same time, it still hit my heart hard that she even had this pain to bury.
Adults do this a lot~ pretend to be okay… even when we aren’t. It hurt to see her doing it, but I am glad she has the ability to understand and learn from it. When we hold back our emotions, they eat at us, and when they finally get let loose it really is like flood gates opening up. Some people cry, some people rage, some people go silent and retreat. This past year has been really heavy for us. And today, for the first time, I watched her finally start to let go of some of the weight of it.
That is real strength.
We all sometimes need a moment to fall apart. To sit in the wreckage of what we’ve been carrying and to finally feel it. Not because we are weak, but because we are real. True healing never gets a chance to start while we pretend we’re okay- it starts when we allow ourselves to not be okay. Only then can we start to move past it, instead of being weighed down holding it in.
While a shattered glass can’t be put together once it’s broke… we definitely can.
You cannot heal what you refuse to feel. You must feel it to let it go. And in that, you become so much stronger than the strongest you’ve ever felt by holding it all together…. and that really is the kind of strength we should be chasing isn’t it?
