"You Are So Strong"
Updated: Jun 21
A Reflection on the Weight of Being Called Strong
It's said with the best intentions. It's meant to provide encouragement. Sometimes it's said from not knowing what else to say in the presence of something so frightening. But somewhere inside you, when you hear the words "You are so strong," you close just a little.
Because there are at least two ways you are so strong can be felt, and both place something heavy in your hands without knowing it. The first is encouragement β you are so strong, I know you'll get through this β as if what you're living through is something your will alone can carry. The second is admiration β you are so strong, you're such an inspiration β which lifts you into a symbol from which others draw meaning, which adds its own kind of lonely pressure when the usual steadiness of your world has just fallen out from under you. In both cases, what you're actually experiencing gets overlooked or glossed over.
What youβre living through is not simply a test of character. Cancer treatment saps everything you have within you. It devastates the body's ability to carry you as it once did. The fatigue that comes with chemotherapy and radiation is not tiredness that determination can push through. It lives in the bones and dismantles your identity in the world. Your mind can't help but worry about the future: Will the treatment you're enduring work? How long do you have to live? How do you show up for everyone else when you can barely show up for yourself? What will happen to your loved ones if you can no longer provide as you have been, or even worse, die? "I don't know who I am anymore," people tell me. And how could you? When the body that once carried you through your life no longer feels like your own, and you are emotionally tapped out from mental and emotional exhaustion. No amount of inner resolve or positive attitude lifts it. To be told how strong you are in the middle of that can feel profoundly unseen.
Yet you make every attempt to hold the image up. Because you've always been the strong one, the one others leaned on and who held things together. Cancer hasn't changed what people see when they look at you, even if it's changed everything about how you feel inside. So you smile, show up to work, play with the kids and walk the dogs, help others solve their problems, and try not to complain or look concerned. Untilβ¦
The accumulation of treatment begins to weigh so heavily on your body that every day feels like you're walking through quicksand, wearing a sheet of lead across your body. When taking a shower exhausts all the physical energy you have for the day. When the next scan shows the treatment isn't shrinking the tumors, or there's a new spot that could be metastases. And you begin worrying so much about the future that you can't possibly focus on what's in front of you today. These are very real weights that a person living alongside cancer has to hold every day. It becomes exhausting, both physically and emotionally. You cannot be expected to use sheer will to steamroll through days of treatment as you did before cancer entered your life.
One thing cancer teaches us is that strength looks different from what we thought. The strength people praised was only ever one version of it, and maybe not the fullest one: the showing up, the holding together. There is grace in being cared for instead of always being the one who cares. Courage in honoring your body's new pace, and choosing how to spend the limited energy you have. Strength in simply surviving a day that asked everything of you. So if you have been wondering why you can't be strong the way everyone insists you are: you haven't failed at being strong. You were only measuring yourself against a definition far too narrow to hold what youβre actually doing.
You are allowed to come undone, to set the whole heavy image down, and to trust that you are no less strong for having done so.
Reflections on the inner psychological experience of living alongside cancer.
Jae L. Ross, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist who works with individuals and families whose lives have been reshaped by cancer, helping them navigate the emotional challenges of diagnosis, treatment, and beyond.
Itβs hard to expect less of yourself.