For some reason, several people I know think that I’m strong. Since nobody else has ever been in my head or spent a day as me, I don’t expect anyone to know what it’s like to be me. As such, I’ll lay out in this blog post why I’m not strong and hope that that will prevent anyone for mistaking me as such again.
I’ll start with the easy one: physical strength. Some folks are naturally physically strong, especially those who come from strong families. Their strength gets even greater if they lift weights or do lots of manual labor from a young age. None of that applies to me. I’ve had to work hard with weights for every bit of physical strength I’ve gained, and I lose it fast when I stop working out for extended periods of time. Even at my peak strength, my lifts weren’t very impressive. Many men and even a number of women close to me in height and weight (or even shorter and lighter than me in some cases) could easily outlift me. I’m the weakest guy at my job and often struggle with lifting things that the other guys can easily hoist. They never hear me out when I talk about how much of a struggle it is for me as they’re convinced that I’m stronger than I really am. Every time I bring up such struggles, they interrupt and tell me how strong they believe me to be. If they could spend one workday in my body, they’d know exactly how weak I am and they’d never again mistake me for being strong.
Aside from lifting heavy things, I used to think I had some physical strength in the form of durability. After all, I’ve never broken a bone despite a number of hard-hitting incidents in life: falling off of a piece of playground equipment onto my arm in elementary school, injuring my knee from a bad ski fall in high school, and getting my ankle run over by the wheel of a trailer in my early twenties, to name a few. However, despite all of those incidents and others like it that make me sound indestructible, there are plenty of things to remind me how fragile I can be. Thin skin that gets cut, scraped, scratched, and bruised easily, for one. For another, there’s the concussion I got from martial arts in late 2021. The proneness to nausea, vomiting, and other stomach issues that I’ve had for most of my life have always been one of my greatest weaknesses. Most recently, there’s the hernia that I got diagnosed with earlier this month. If I were strong, I wouldn’t have gotten the hernia or many of the other health issues I’ve dealt with throughout my life, especially the ones involving strain or damage to my body.
More important than the fact that I’m not strong is the point that I no longer wish I were strong. After all, those who are considered strong are usually given the heaviest, hardest, and most hated tasks and are expected to do them quickly, easily, and without any issues or complaints. If they succeed, they’re given even more grueling tasks to do in the future, and the cycle repeats until they quit, get fired, or drop dead. The same goes for life in general outside of work, except for the firing part. I’d much rather have something sustainable that I can do for part of my day and then quickly move on to other things I enjoy more and which I’d rather do, whether at work or elsewhere. This is especially the case at any job I might have since I work to live, not live to work. It’s the stuff outside of work that makes me feel good and benefits from the money I get at work that makes the work worth doing. Even with things I enjoy doing, though, I make sure not to spend too much time on them so that I don’t get sick of them. Sometimes, that means just a few minutes a day of an activity is enough to keep my skills sharp and my interest in it strong. When I finish a weekend-long gig that involves a lot of juggling each day, the last thing I want to do after that is juggle. Aside from the monotony, there’s also the physical wear and tear, which is another sign of my lack of strength as jugglers who are stronger than me can juggle many more objects for far longer than I can without feeling tired or having to take extra time off.
Just like Daniel Striped Tiger on an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, sometimes I wonder if I’m a mistake and if the strong never break. In addition to breaking physically, I’ve also broken emotionally, mentally, and spiritually more times than I can count in life. Nearly every year from the past decade has either broken me or taken me close to breaking, and none of them have made me any stronger. Losing both of my maternal grandparents about seven years apart was hard enough. My dog Sawyer’s death back in 2022 broke me more than anything else in my life. I don’t know how much more heartbreak on that level I can handle, or if I could handle even greater heartbreak. Although Sawyer’s death is the most painful experience of my life so far, who’s to say that I won’t someday be put through an even more painful experience that breaks me for even longer? Meanwhile, plenty of folks out there, including some I’ve known personally, have gone through far more than I have without breaking, such as homelessness, bankruptcy, abusive marriages, catastrophic health issues, tragic loss of many loved ones in a short span of time, and so on. How can anyone consider me to be strong when I’ve been repeatedly broken by stuff that most others on Earth can and do easily handle all the time?
In case you dislike me comparing myself to others here, let’s compare present me to past me. While I’ve improved in some ways, in many other ways, I’ve gotten weaker over time. For example, I used to feel way less nervous about walking into a room full of strangers as a kid than I have for most of my adult life. I also had a much easier time standing up for myself in my youth than I do now. People pleasing has been one of my biggest struggles in adulthood, and there are still aspects of that that frequently come up. Beyond that, I used to be much better at getting through lots of things in a timely manner without feeling overwhelmed. It astonishes me to think that in elementary and middle school, I easily handled normal schooling, homework, band practice, soccer practice, and a few other extracurricular activities every week while still getting enough sleep, making good grades, generally excelling at whatever I did, and having enough time each day to relax with TV and a book. Sounds like that would make it even easier to handle minor challenges in adulthood, right? Except that now, some days I feel so overwhelmed that I just go through the motions and do hardly anything. I never had days like that as a kid, so why are they appearing as an adult? I’ve gone backwards in all of these areas as I’ve gotten older, and that concerns me since those are all important skills to have in adulthood, and I don’t see how I’ll make it without them.
My blog posts as of late have ended without some resolution, answers, or plans. This one will continue that trend. As usual, I’m not looking for advice here. What works great for you may be just ok or even counterproductive for me, so I’m quite selective at this point about what I do and always take what others say with a grain of salt. My only hope at this point is that I’ll continue to heal from pain where I can and somehow find a path in life that allows me to enjoy it as best as possible despite my weakness.