Nearly every job interview I have ever had, the interviewer has asked me to tell them my greatest strength and greatest weakness. I am not sure I ever gave an honest answer. I mean, who does? We try our hardest to give a strength we think would impress the interviewer, then we give a weakness that is really a strength, and we try our hardest to seem humble. You know, something like, “I am really organized, so it is hard for me to leave a job undone or a mess. I often give too much to my career and sacrifice my personal time to get the job done.” I mean, come on, how can anyone really give a weakness and expect to get the job? But what if your strength IS actually a weakness? I have begun to see my strong will and “get-er-done” attitude as a crippling attribute that can leave me exhausted and completely empty. Why is that, you ask? Because the strong become the ones everyone turns to in hard times and chaos, but what happens when the strong break under the pressure? The scariest look to receive is from a family member who sees you breaking, and the fear in their eyes as they ask themselves, if you can’t handle it, how will they?
Growing up, I learned quickly to hide the hurt. I learned to pull myself up by my bootstraps (yes, it can be done), to wipe my eyes and deal. Three big brothers didn’t exactly lead to a girl in flowy dresses and a straight tiara. I was more of the torn jeans and a Bryan Adams t-shirt under my flannel, with a baseball cap on my head and an attitude in my walk kinda gal. The words by Miranda Lambert ring truer in my ears than most.
“Hide your crazy and start acting like a lady, cause I raised you better. Gotta keep it together even when you fall apart”
Miranda Lambert ‘Four the Record’
I learned early to stuff the emotions too big to handle deep down and not let the fear of it all show. The world could be falling down around you, but girl, you better have those lips on just right! I was always proud of being the strong one in the group; it was easy to hide the nerves and insecurities when everyone around you depended on you to get through it. It gets easier with time to hit hard times head-on and do it with a smile, shrug your shoulders, and just deal. I spent many years taking on the challenge of turning chaos into manageable hardship, only to find it isn’t really all that manageable. When deciding on adoption, I never doubted for a moment that I would handle the craziness that would come with the cuteness. I heard over and over from all our friends and family, “If anyone can do this, it’s you.” It became a repeated phrase each time we hit a new type of chaos, every time I reached out to say I wasn’t sure I could get through it.
She ran away again, stayed gone all night this time ” you’re strong enough to get through this”
She pulled a knife on her brother and is threating to kill us all “if anyone can get through this its you”
I’m doubting everything and everyone around me. “Girl, I know you got this”
At some point there has to be recognition that there is a wall that can be hit and not climbed by even the strongest. When that happens, what do you do? Well, you do what you’ve always done, you pull yourself up by the bootstrap, brush yourself off and then have a long conversation with yourself on how to continue on, but only after you have allowed yourself to break.
You see, only when one breaks can one be put back together. When you break, there is no choice but to be put back together (well, not a choice I want or can acknowledge). When you break, those around you have to step in; it forces them to, and forces you to allow it. There is a key question in job interviews that I think goes right over the heads of those who have the inherent need to do it all and do it all well: “Do you work better in a group or alone?” Again, who says “alone”? Even when knowing you would do it faster and better if you just did it yourself, that’s not what the employer wants to hear, even when they know you’re being hired because there is a need for someone who can do it alone without fail. It’s a catch-22. Better together, easier alone, never admit the latter.
That is the reason strength can be a weakness. You don’t learn to lean on people in hard times, you learn to lead them through it. You aren’t use to asking if another sees a better path forward, you’re focused on controlling the path you’re on. Employers ask if you work well with others for a reason, there are warnings for two person lifts for a reason, sports have teams not just one athlete for a reason. We need others to help so we don’t get hurt or burnt out or lost in the chaos and make it to the finish line. When you control, take it all on, and plow through, you remove lessons that both you and the ones you are trying to help need to be able to learn. When you don’t allow help, how will they learn to do so? They can’t and those who knew how have become too frozen from your control or compliant and lazy to do so. Just take a look around you, we have become a society that sits back and watches people struggle while we shrug our shoulders and say “Meh, they can handle it. It’s not my place to step in”.
I hit my wall four years ago. I finally broke under all the “strength” of holding it together. In my breaking, my husband, son, some family, and close friends were able to step up and surround me with the true strength I so desperately needed: love, comfort, rest. They helped me through letting go—letting go of the future I fought for and would never see, letting go of the expectations that hard work would surely pay off, letting go of dreams that were never mine to dream. Our oldest daughter turned 18 and turned to a life we had tried desperately to guard her from; our other two children had to live separately, so we had to buy a second home. All of this was smack-dab in the thick of COVID. I had too many paths of chaos, and none of them could be managed without my breaking and being put back together. I didn’t break overnight; I broke slowly and painfully as each hit came at me. I didn’t get put back together overnight; I had to sit through each piece of me being picked up off the floor and then had to wait for the glue to dry before the next piece could be found and placed. I still haven’t found all the pieces of who I once was; the cracks are still raw, the glue still not completely dry. Today, exactly 14 years to the day of finalizing the adoption of my beautiful blue-eyed girl, I am planning a trip to sit in court and fight for her beautiful little brown-eyed girl to be kept from her so she has a chance and a future her mother was robbed of. She chose the life I put all my strength into fighting off, and in my weakness, I blamed myself for not having enough strength to save her. But I now realize it takes more strength to let go and allow her to make her own path, find her own way out of the pit, or allow her to bury herself in that pit. We all have to choose, take the lessons taught, and do with them what we will.
I have a new future in sight, dreams that are mine to dream, and expectations of finding myself all over again with a little hard work and help from the love of my life…and so I write.
soshewritesweb 