Dear Reader,

You have been told your whole life that you are strong.

Look at what you have handled. Look at what you have carried. Look at how you kept going when other people would have collapsed. That is character. That is resilience. That is what makes you you.

You have taken those compliments as evidence. Every hard thing you got through became another data point in the story of your strength. You built your identity on it.

And underneath the identity, a quieter truth has been waiting.

You did not choose to be strong. You did not choose to have a strong character. You just did not have anywhere to put anything down.

Most people who try to open their third eye start with a forty minute meditation.

There's a much smaller doorway in. Three seconds, done correctly, and you'll feel the difference behind your forehead before you finish reading this sentence.

Try It Once Here

That's all it takes to know if it's for you.

Endurance is not the same as strength. Sometimes endurance is what happens when there is no one to hand the weight to. When collapsing was not an option because someone else needed you upright. When falling apart would have cost you more than staying together.

You did not build a strong character. You built a container that could hold everything, because no one else was going to hold it for you.

I did this with the label "resilient" for years. Every therapist, every friend, every family member told me how resilient I was. I wore it like a merit badge. It took me a long time to notice that resilience was just the word I had been using for "I never got to fall apart."

I was not stronger than everyone else. I just had no one to catch me if I stopped.

Here is the honest truth. When you praise yourself for enduring things that should not have happened, you are letting the situation off the hook by giving yourself the credit.

If you want to stop pee leaks and never again dread laughing, sneezing, or standing up too fast, follow these steps:

1. Grab a small bowl;

2. Pour in some Diet Coke;

3. Add this yellow powder;

4. Rub the mixture gently on your lower belly, just above the bladder.

This short video shows the steps in detail:

Diet Coke + THIS = No More Pee Leaks?

If the story is that you got through it because you are strong, then the thing you got through was never the problem. Your strength was the answer. The situation gets to stay the way it was.

But if you look honestly at what you endured, some of it was not survivable through strength. Some of it should not have been survived. Some of it should have been prevented, or interrupted, or held by other people who should have shown up and did not.

You did not need to be strong. You needed someone to notice you should not have had to be.

The ego runs this because "I am strong" is a much cleaner story than "I was left alone with something too heavy for me." The first story is empowering. The second story is grief.

So you keep telling yourself the first one. You keep collecting evidence of your resilience. You keep taking pride in what you have endured, because pride is more tolerable than grief.

But the grief is still there, under the pride. It is the part of you that quietly knows you should not have had to be this strong. That some of what you carried was not yours to carry. That the character you built was built out of necessity, not choice, and you are allowed to mourn that.

Today, do not perform your strength. In one small moment, let yourself be a person who does not have to hold it. Ask for help you do not technically need. Let something be hard without immediately proving you can handle it. Say "this is too much" out loud, even if only to yourself.

You are not becoming weaker. You are stopping the performance long enough to feel what has been underneath it all along.

Some of what has been underneath is exhaustion. Some of it is anger. Some of it is grief for the person who never got to be helped.

She deserves to be met, finally.

This is your magnetic mindset: you stop mistaking endurance for identity. You start letting yourself be a person who could have used help, could have used softness, could have used someone else showing up, and someone who can name that stops confusing having survived something with having chosen it.

Strength you did not choose is not a character trait. It is a coping mechanism that deserves to be laid down.

What have you been calling your strong character that was actually just something you carried because there was no one to hand it to — and what would it feel like to grieve that, instead of taking pride in it?

Mindfully Yours,
Magnetic Mindset