Strength
Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.
If I had ten bucks for every time someone said, wrote, published or preached this, I’d be driving Rolls Royce’s Cullian to a fjord in Norway on a cold evening, from where I’d look up in awe at the northern lights, and look down to see humpback whales playing with each other. Reality continues to ruin my life.
With conversations about mental health more abundant and prevalent than ever before in history, littered with shallow platitudes like “it’s okay to not be okay,” — what does saying this to anyone do, really? — you would expect as much comfort in discussing and embracing weakness as there is in conversations about depression or sexual orientation. You wouldn’t be more wrong.
What feeds our obsession with strength? What is it about weakness that makes it so repulsive, undesirable and disgusting? In conversations involving someone having overcome depression, or having survived cancer, for instance, how often is the sentence “I’m stronger than I was” used? Even in a job interview, when you’re asked what your weaknesses are, the tacit agreement is that you ought to only mention a weakness which you managed to convert to a strength.
The stigma around weakness is endorsed by the fact that we want our lives to be desirable for everyone. We want to be wanted. The culture of personal branding is the Millennials’ brainchild. At the foundation of this culture is an irrefutable and a largely unperceived notion that life is a product. Everybody wants to showcase their journey of overcoming weaknesses, because it makes their product — their lives — more desirable. Weakness gets in the way of its desirability.
As I deliberate on the demand for strength and the almost universal pursuit, both individualistic and collective, to become stronger every day, I can’t help but wonder about all the things that are never felt because we’re immediately and subconsciously looking for ways to avoid encountering any manifestation of weakness.
It is established that physical pain is a side effect of working out. What if, just like post-workout pains are necessary to give definition and endurance to the body, embracing weakness in all its intensity is necessary to give definition and endurance to the mind (or heart, if that’s where you prefer to feel)? We won’t be able to showcase an emotional workout on Instagram and have it garner likes, but for one, that doesn’t make it any less effective, and for another, we get to feel a whole other spectrum of emotions we’ve been taught to kill or run away from upon first contact.
Weakness — both physical and emotional — is a frequent visitor of mine. When I was in college, weakness visited me almost every week, and I was outraged at my helplessness. I felt alone, lonely, friendless, shallow, and useless. When I went to a different country for my post-graduate course, all those negative feelings amplified. Along the way, however, I did one thing differently: I welcomed any incarnate of weakness. I swam in it, reflected on it, and even got to know it better, but without ever looking to turn it into a strength.
After nearly a decade, I think that weakness and I are good acquaintances now. We recognize each other, and we even enjoy each other’s company. Sometimes, we listen to some melancholic music and feel the wind on my terrace. Other times, we share silence on a drive under the night lights. He’s well-behaved in the passenger seat, and we’ve agreed that both of us will always wear our seat belts.
Naturally, during most of his visits, weakness is a brat. He makes me feel miserable, sometimes even breaks me completely, shattering my spirit in irrecoverable ways. However, he invariably shows up with a present: an emotional range extender. He makes it possible for me to see, touch, feel and hug a whole range of negative emotions: sorrow, fear, loss, misery, frustration, despair, anger, defeat. He makes life richer, even though — and especially because — the process has nothing to do with strength.
If weakness shows up to meet you, let him in. I can vouch for him. Hug him hello. When he visits your friends, your family or your partners, tell them to hug him hello too. I concede that sometimes, he can be too much to handle. If you see that he’s overwhelming the people you love, be there for them. If he overwhelms you, ask them to be there for you. Life is certainly the longest thing we’ll ever be a part of. We weren’t meant to go through it alone, or without weakness, so don’t chase him away.
There is an invisible, implicit pressure on us to see beauty and positivity in everything: in strife, in loss, in defeat. Well, sometimes, beauty doesn’t show up. She has to be somewhere else. There is bitterness in defeat, which you can’t always channel into a winning spirit. I’m sure that the Real Madrid side which didn’t win the Champions’ League for three decades in a row, and the Liverpool side that hasn’t lifted the Premier League trophy for almost two decades now will corroborate that.
Let weakness break you. You’ll shatter, and you won’t be put back together like you were. So what? And no, I’m not going to hurl the “caterpillar has to die for the butterfly to be born” eyewash at you, because sometimes the butterfly doesn’t emerge. Mourn the fucking caterpillar.
Experience the negative hues of life without constantly wondering how you can turn them into positive ones. Sulk. Break. Cry. Lose. It’s a part of life so many of us are missing out on because we’re obsessed with strength.
Maybe you’ll see beauty in weakness right away, as the tears flow out after your tenth straight defeat. Maybe you’ll see beauty in weakness when you’re seventy three, sunbathing at a beach in Goa, sipping your fourth beer. Maybe you’ll never see any beauty in weakness at all. It’s all right, because truthfully …
Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.
And that, by no means, is the end of the world.
