Those words took me a very long time to believe. In fact, I still struggle with that phrase today. Growing up, I thought that to be strong and resilient, you had to hide all emotion and not care about anything. Caring meant risking loss, and loss brought sadness and vulnerability, which I equated with weakness.
In my life, weakness was a joke. My mother was seen as weak and was often ridiculed by our family. Every day, I strive to be the opposite of her. Showing emotion and weakness was unacceptable, so I learned to numb my feelings with drugs. For years, I convinced myself and others that I just liked getting high. I denied that I was running from the trauma I had experienced. Admitting that would mean acknowledging weakness, and I couldn't even allow myself to think that. I told myself I wasn't affected by the past and that I was just a junkie who liked being high.
It wasn't until a year after getting clean that I began to realize it’s okay to have feelings. It’s okay to feel emotions and to sometimes lose control over them. That’s part of being human. Someone told me, "You are not weak, you are human," and I laughed. I had been conditioned not to believe it. But I decided to try an experiment. I wrote that down as one of my daily affirmations and stuck it to my bathroom mirror. Every time I went in there, I would read it out loud. It sounded ridiculous, but I persisted. I didn't give up after a few days; I kept at it. I wrote down ten positive things about myself and repeated them out loud every day.
At first, I felt stupid, but after a few weeks, I realized it didn't seem so ridiculous anymore. I began to believe it. Feeling emotions is what makes us human. Having the capacity to feel, process, and let emotions guide us or consume us is part of being human. And you know what? It's okay to be human. It’s not weak. In fact, being able to process and handle your emotions makes you one of the strongest people in the world. It’s those who hide from their emotions who are weak. I spent a long time being weak—numbing, hiding, afraid to face the feelings I knew were there: anger, fear, longing, vulnerability. I hated my feelings because I had been trained to see them as weakness, and I refused to be weak. I refused to be like my mother.
I started working with a coach who taught me to embrace my feelings, to sit with them, and let them consume me for a while. I would then meditate and release those unhealthy emotions into the universe. This took time—meditation didn’t come easily to me. But I kept at it, because all good things take time. Now, I feel a certain freedom in my emotions. I won't lie and say I don’t still struggle sometimes; a lifetime of conditioning doesn't disappear after a few years of work. But when I feel that weakness, I can remind myself it’s not real. I can release it into the universe and free myself from it. I refuse to let the fear of weakness define me. Vulnerability makes us human, and I am lucky to be human. With all its ups and downs, highs and lows, we are lucky to experience this thing called life. Some of us have a harder road to walk, but that just makes us stronger in the end. Those of us who don’t give up, no matter how hopeless things may seem, are the ones who truly rule the world.
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