They See Weakness, But They Don’t Know Me

Sometimes I wonder how my own family sees me.

I feel like they look at me and see weakness.

Maybe they see someone emotional.

Someone who struggles.

Someone who gets overwhelmed.

Someone who has not handled life the way they think I should have.

But sometimes I want to ask them:

Do you actually know me?

Do you know what it took for me to get this far?

Do you know how many things I survived without anyone realizing what was happening inside me?

Do you know how many times I kept going when I felt like I had nothing left?

People can see the version of you that exists today and make judgments without knowing what it took to become that person.

They see the anxiety.

They see the exhaustion.

They see the moments when I fall apart.

But they do not always see the years I held myself together.

They may see someone they believe is weak.

I see someone who survived.

And yet, there is another truth I am beginning to face.

Sometimes I do not know who I am anymore.

That is hard for me to admit.

For so much of my life, I learned how to be what I needed to be in order to survive.

I learned how to watch people.

How to keep the peace.

How to take the blame.

How to push my feelings down.

How to keep going when I was exhausted.

How to be strong when I did not feel strong at all.

When you live that way for long enough, survival can start to become your identity.

Then one day you begin healing, and you are left with a question you may never have had the chance to ask before:

Who am I when I am not just surviving?

I do not always know the answer.

I know the roles I have played.

I know the person other people expected me to be.

I know the person I became when I needed to protect myself.

But I am still learning who I am underneath all of that.

Maybe my family does not understand that.

Maybe they only know pieces of me.

Maybe they have formed an idea of who I am from the parts they have seen without ever understanding the parts they did not.

And maybe I have spent too much time trying to prove myself to people who have already decided who they think I am.

I am beginning to realize that I do not need everyone to understand my strength for it to be real.

Strength does not always look powerful.

Sometimes strength looks like getting out of bed when you want to disappear beneath the covers.

Sometimes it looks like crying and still continuing.

Sometimes it looks like setting a boundary after years of being afraid to say no.

Sometimes it looks like admitting that you are tired.

Sometimes it looks like finally saying, “That hurt me.”

And sometimes strength looks like realizing you no longer want to live your life proving that you are strong.

I do not want to spend the rest of my life defending who I am.

I want to discover who I am.

Not the version of me that trauma created.

Not the version my family thinks they know.

Not the person other people need me to be.

Me.

Maybe I am still meeting her.

Maybe healing is not only about recovering from what happened to me.

Maybe part of healing is finding the person underneath everything that happened.

And if someone looks at me during that process and sees weakness, they may simply not understand what they are looking at.

Because they do not know everything I have survived.

And they do not get to decide who I am becoming.