I’ve spent most of my life around strong people. People I admired for their resilience, their ability to push through, their seemingly unshakeable resolve. I used to think strength was about overcoming. About facing an obstacle and muscling your way past it. About endurance and willpower and the refusal to break. Watching the people I’ve known best over the years, particularly as they’ve aged and faced real hardship, I’ve come to understand that I was wrong about what strength actually is.
The strongest person I know is my friend Marcus, who lost his daughter fifteen years ago. She was seven. There is no overcoming this. There is no obstacle you push past and find yourself on the other side of, whole again. There is just learning to carry it, day after day, in a way that doesn’t poison everything else. I watched Marcus in the months after her death, and he had every reason to become bitter. Instead, he did something much harder: he sat with the worst pain imaginable and didn’t let it metastasize into cruelty.
I’ve watched him become gentler over the years, not harder. More patient, not less. More forgiving of the small failures and stumbles of people around him. He seems to understand, in a way I don’t think he did before, that everyone is carrying something. Everyone is suffering in ways that aren’t visible.
Then there’s my sister, who spent three years going through infertility. She and her husband wanted children desperately. And it didn’t work. They don’t have children. She had to grieve not just the children she didn’t have, but the life she’d imagined, the person she thought she’d be by this point. This is pain that can’t be overcome. You can’t will your way past it. You can only slowly learn to construct a life around the absence of it.
What amazes me about my sister is how much patience she developed through this process. She works with young families now, something she chose to do. She could have become bitter—she had every reason to. Instead, she became someone who genuinely celebrates other people’s joy without it curdling into resentment.
I’ve also watched ordinary people face ordinary suffering—the slow dissolution of a marriage that wasn’t bad enough to end but wasn’t good enough to be fulfilling, the aging parent who becomes increasingly difficult and ungrateful, the career that stalled before you wanted it to. The kinds of pain that don’t resolve but just become part of your life. And I’ve noticed that the people who handle this well aren’t necessarily the ones who overcome it. They’re the ones who learn to carry it without taking it out on everyone around them.
I’ve also watched people fail at this. I’ve seen people with legitimate grievances let those grievances become their entire personality. I’ve watched people who experienced real hardship use it as permission to be unkind to others. The pain was real in all these cases. The difference is what they chose to do with it.
This is where the real strength lies, I think. Not in overcoming the pain, but in choosing not to pass it on. Not in denying it or transcending it, but in feeling it fully and still being kind anyway. That’s so much harder than any physical endurance feat.
Research on trauma and resilience has shifted significantly over the last couple of decades. What we now understand is that the most resilient people aren’t those who recover quickly or return to baseline, but rather those who are able to integrate traumatic experiences and continue growing despite them. They don’t transcend their pain; they live alongside it.
I think about how we talk about strength in our culture. We celebrate the hero’s journey, the comeback story, the person who faced adversity and triumphed. These stories are inspiring, but they’re also incomplete. They suggest that strength is something you achieve once, through a feat of willpower. In reality, strength is something you have to choose, over and over again, particularly when you’re exhausted.
This is especially true as you age. The real test of strength isn’t whether you can overcome obstacles—it’s whether you can face the things that can’t be overcome and not become bitter. Can you lose something and not spend the rest of your life punishing others for that loss? Can you face disappointment and still be generous?
I’ve noticed that the people who develop this kind of strength often don’t realize they have it. They don’t think of themselves as particularly resilient or strong. They think of themselves as ordinary people doing their best to not cause additional harm while carrying their own wounds. But to everyone around them, they’re extraordinary.
I’m trying to learn this now, in my own way. I’m trying to notice the moments when I want to pass my discomfort on to someone else, and I’m trying to choose differently. I’m trying to remember that everyone around me is carrying something, even if I can’t see it. This is what I’ve learned from watching strong people: the real courage is in choosing kindness when you have every reason not to.
This is the strength that actually changes the world, I think. Not the strength of overcoming, but the strength of presence. The strength of being able to sit with someone else’s pain without trying to fix it or diminish it or make it about you. The strength of carrying your own suffering and still showing up for others with an open heart.
