I Never Wanted to Be Strong

This is something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, but I didn’t have the language for it until now. People have called me “strong” for years, and I’ve smiled and accepted it even though it never felt like a compliment. This piece is my attempt to tell the truth beneath that word — what strength actually cost, what it silenced and what I’m learning to choose instead. If you’ve ever been praised for surviving something you never wanted to endure, this is for you.

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People tell me all the time how strong I am. That I’m the strongest person they know. They say it like it’s a compliment, like it should land as something I’m proud of.

I hate it.

Not because it isn’t true, but because strength was never something I wanted to be known for. Strength wasn’t a personality trait. It was a survival strategy. And it came at a cost no one ever asks about.

When people call me strong, what they’re really saying is you survived something unbearable. But “strong” is easier to say than that should never have happened to you. It’s easier than sitting with the grief, the unfairness, the loneliness of it all.

Strength makes other people comfortable.

It reassures them that devastation is survivable, that life moves on, that tragedy can be neatly folded into a story with an ending that feels acceptable. My strength becomes proof that things work out. That people endure. That everything is, somehow, okay.

But strength didn’t feel like empowerment while I was living it.

It felt like staying upright because there was no other option. It felt like swallowing pain so it wouldn’t spill onto anyone else. It felt like learning, very early on, how to hold everything myself.

Strength wasn’t about bravery.
It was about necessity.

And the part that rarely gets acknowledged is this: the stronger I appeared, the less anyone checked on me. The less room there was for my grief. The less permission I had to fall apart.

Being “so strong” often meant being alone with what I was carrying.

People call you strong because they don’t know what else to say.
Because strength makes suffering palatable.
Because if you’re strong, they don’t have to sit with how much you endured alone.

Strength is a compliment that often lets other people off the hook.

I never set out to be strong.
I adapted.

And there is a world of difference between the two.

Strength Wasn’t a Choice

I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel like I had to be strong.

I’m sure it started early. When my brother Jared was born and everything shifted. When I was suddenly left to take care of myself. I didn’t grow up in a family where we looked out for each other. We looked after ourselves. You learned quickly not to need too much. Not to expect someone else to catch you.

I can’t recall a time when I allowed myself to fall apart.

Even after Connor died.

I remember getting ready for his funeral. My mom and sister came to take me to Costco to buy picture frames and print photos for the service. I was a zombie, wandering the aisles under fluorescent lights, pushing a cart like I was doing an errand instead of preparing to bury my child.

At one point, I had to use the restroom. I went into the stall without looking at myself. When I came out to wash my hands, I finally caught my reflection in the mirror.

Greasy hair.
Sunken eyes.
Hollow cheeks.

I remember looking at myself and thinking, You have got to get it together.

Not gently. Not kindly.
Like a berating.

I’ve since heard other parents who have lost children or spouses talk about staying in bed all day, about being unable to move, about the world stopping completely. I remember feeling almost envious of that kind of collapse.

I never allowed myself that.

I stayed upright. I kept moving.

And I lost those things anyway.

Strength didn’t save my life the way I thought it would. It only kept me from feeling the full weight of what was already happening.

What Strength Required Me to Silence

Fear, shame, regret and anger were all there. I carried them constantly. I just never expressed them.

The shame was the heaviest.

My child died at thirteen from a drug overdose. At the time, he was the youngest death in Utah tied to the opioid epidemic. That fact alone felt like a verdict. What kind of parent lets that happen? What kind of mother misses something so catastrophic?

I lived inside those questions.

I replayed everything. Every decision. Every moment. Every sign I might have missed. I should have known. I should have done more. I should have seen it sooner. I should’ve all over myself until shame became a second skin.

Because I was rebuilding my entire life at the same time — my home, my work, my sense of stability, my identity — I didn’t feel like I had the option to fall apart. So I compartmentalized. I put Connor’s death in a box and shoved it as far down as I could reach so I could keep functioning.

That’s what strength demanded.

Grief doesn’t disappear when you do that. It just moves. It goes into the body. That’s where emotions go when we don’t allow ourselves to feel them. They settle into muscle and breath and posture. They wait.

I carried my grief the way I carried everything else — silently and alone.

I never voiced my needs because I didn’t know how. That wasn’t something I was ever taught. Needing felt foreign. Asking felt unsafe. I didn’t have language for what I required, only an internal pressure to keep going no matter what it cost.

Strength didn’t make room for my fear.
It didn’t tolerate my anger.
It had no patience for regret.

So I swallowed all of it.

The Cost No One Saw

My health began deteriorating almost immediately after Connor died.

I started having panic attacks. At first, I told myself that was probably normal. That it would pass with time. And while the panic attacks did become less frequent, something deeper had shifted. I couldn’t carry stress the way I used to. The demands of my job, daily life, simple decisions — everything felt heavier.

I was easily overwhelmed, but I learned early how to keep moving and never show the cracks.

It felt like my internal vessel was already full. Overflowing with emotion I wasn’t releasing. So the smallest additional stress tipped me over the edge. Things that once felt manageable suddenly felt impossible.

After Connor died, I threw myself into advocacy. I became deeply involved with the local prescription drug awareness campaign. I spoke at schools, addiction and recovery seminars, hospitals. I worked with local government on awareness efforts and prescription take-back events.

I showed up. I used my voice. I did the thing people applaud.

And after — sometimes during — almost every speaking engagement, I would leave with crushing heartburn. The kind that stopped me in my tracks. The kind that felt like fire moving up my chest.

As anniversaries approached — Connor’s birthday, the date of his death — my body would start signaling in other ways. A migraine that came out of nowhere. A strange, unexplained rash. Symptoms without a clear cause, but always with familiar timing.

My body knew what I wouldn’t let myself say.

I’ve always struggled with vulnerability, but during this time it hardened into something even I didn’t recognize. The hyper-independence was off the charts. I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t lean. I didn’t soften.

I survived by containing everything.

And my body paid the price.

Who My Strength Served

My strength served everyone around me — with the exception of myself and Noah.

It made it easier for people to be with me. Easier because they didn’t have to see the raw, unfiltered truth of what it actually looks like to lose a child. They weren’t asked to sit with me in my grief. They didn’t have to witness the mess of it, the way it dismantles you from the inside out.

From a distance, strength is comfortable.

It allowed people to look at me and say, Wow, she is so strong. I could never do that, without ever having to come close enough to feel what it cost. My strength made tragedy easier to observe. Easier to admire. Easier to keep contained.

The truth is, being strong is one of the loneliest experiences there is.

When you’re strong, you become the one who depends on yourself. Not because no one cares, but because your strength leaves no visible opening. People assume you’re okay. They assume you’re handling it. They assume you don’t need much.

And eventually, you start assuming that too.

Strength taught me how to survive without support. It also taught me how to keep people at a distance without meaning to. I didn’t allow others to show up for me because I didn’t know how to let them. I didn’t know what it would look like to be held in the middle of something so unbearable.

Strength worked — until it didn’t.

It stopped working when my body made it clear that all of my health issues were connected to one thing: I had never allowed myself to sit in the beautiful, ugly mess of grief. I had managed it. Contained it. Organized my life around it.

But I hadn’t felt it.

Strength had kept me upright.
It had also kept me alone.

And eventually, the cost became impossible to ignore.

The Loneliness of Being “Okay”

After the service, people drifted away.

That happens a lot after a death. There’s an initial surge of presence — meals, cards, condolences — and then life resumes. People go back to their routines and assume you’re doing fine. Especially if you look like you are.

Friends and family checked in less and less. Not out of cruelty, but assumption.

Even my parents, who had lost two children themselves and knew this kind of grief intimately, didn’t check in. And I didn’t ask for help. The silence wasn’t one-sided. It was mutual.

I had been taught, explicitly and implicitly, that you can only rely on yourself. That no one is really coming to take care of you in this world. Strength wasn’t just survival — it was the rule.

To admit I wasn’t fine would have required a kind of vulnerability I couldn’t imagine at the time. It would have meant opening myself up to more pain. To disappointment. To being seen in a way I didn’t know how to survive.

So I stayed contained.

I did all of that speaking — schools, hospitals, recovery spaces — but I did it with distance. With armor. I kept myself just far enough away from my own rawness to stay safe. There was purpose in it, yes. I wanted to help. I wanted to create awareness.

And there was something else underneath it, too.

A quiet fuck you to anyone who wanted to judge me.

I remember after a news article was published about Connor’s story, someone commented, This is why you need to do more than just watch movies with your kids. I had mentioned watching a movie with Connor the night he died.

That comment gutted me.

Because Connor and I did so much more than that. We read books together in bed at night. We went snowboarding almost every weekend. We did art projects. We went shopping. We hiked. We talked. We lived our lives together.

But grief invites judgment. And strength becomes a shield.

That might have been when strength stopped feeling empowering and started feeling isolating. When I realized that no matter how much I showed up, no matter how much good I tried to do, there would always be someone ready to reduce my motherhood to a single moment they didn’t understand.

So I stayed strong.
I stayed defended.
I stayed alone.

What I’m Choosing Now

I have learned so much on this journey. And I want to be clear about something: I am not grateful that Connor died. I would do anything to bring him back. There is no lesson worth that cost.

And still — both things can be true.

I can see the gift his early departure gave me, even though I never asked for it. The gift of finally tending to the old wounds I’d carried my entire life. Wounds that existed long before Connor and would have continued shaping me quietly if they hadn’t been forced into the light.

His death dismantled me in a way nothing else ever had.

It taught me how to sit with people in their grief without trying to fix it or rush it or make it easier to look at. It taught me how to stay present in the unbearable. How to listen. How to hold space without asking anyone to be strong for my comfort.

I have become more loving. More accepting. More empathetic. Not because suffering ennobles us, but because grief strips away the illusion that we’re separate from one another.

Now, I’m learning something new.

I’m learning how to be vulnerable. How to love fully without bracing for impact. How to allow people to show up for me instead of managing everything alone. I’m learning how to voice my needs — something I was never taught how to do — and to trust that they might actually be met.

I’m learning how to release emotions and trauma from my body instead of asking it to keep holding everything for me. How to let my body heal instead of demanding resilience from it.

And I am deeply passionate about helping other people do the same.

Not by telling them to be strong.
Not by glorifying survival.
But by reminding them that they don’t have to carry everything alone.

Strength kept me alive.
Vulnerability is teaching me how to live.

If you want to keep walking with me, I’m sharing the rest of this journey on Threads of My Heart.

Another thread from my heart to yours.