My Brain's Not Broken

This hasn’t been a good week for me. I’ve had trouble controlling my emotions and keeping myself in check, and it hasn’t been easy. I constantly feel like I’m on the verge of breaking down, and I’m doing my best to avoid it if I can. I’ve had days, weeks and months like this before, so it’s nothing new. But being pushed to your limits physically, emotionally or mentally is exhausting. Fortunately, I know what to do when I feel this way: lean on my sources of strength.

It might look different on people but whether or not we acknowledge it, we are all strong. We all gather strength from different sources and they help build us into the people we become. It’s not the best metaphor ever, but I like to think of it as drinking water from a well. Whenever I’m in a fight and don’t have the energy to fight back, I go back to the well and take a drink, and that gives me the strength to keep on fighting.

So where do we get our strength from? Where do we turn when we’re trying to survive life’s challenges? After doing a little research, I found a few different areas and sources of strength that people tend to turn to when they don’t have much left in the tank.

• Family/Your People. Sometimes it’s the family you’re born into. Sometimes it’s a family you create. Regardless, these are the people that have your back no matter what, and won’t hesitate in making sure we’re okay. When you can’t, they’re there to pick you up.
• Faith. Regardless of what you believe in, we all have faith in things. Whether it’s a higher power, the people around us, the beauty of nature or just faith in ourselves, faith exists. Whatever you have faith in, whatever you believe, you can use it to give you the strength you need.
• Reflection. When you feel drained, reflect on what you’ve done before. It’s likely this isn’t the first hardship you’ve faced. We’ve all overcome obstacles before, and remembering that can be the fuel we need to stand up to the next challenge. We can’t forget how badass we’ve been before – and we can do it again!
• Repetition. If you feel like things are out of control, finding a few key things to do every day, even every hour if necessary, can help keep you focused. Think of it as those 10,000 hours you need to repeat but instead of a skill, you’re working on becoming a stronger person.

I was reading something recently that said that we never really want to know how the depths of our strength, and I get that. Life circumstances usually bring those depths out of us, it’s unfortunate but true. But the other part of this post said that it’s also because we have doubts that we don’t want to know the depths of our strength because deep down, we don’t think we’re strong enough. Many of us have doubts, myself included. But make no mistake – we are all stronger than we think.

As we continue to draw from our sources of strength, we use them to become stronger every day, working to become the best versions of ourselves. I hope you can identify and find those sources of strength because we all have them. If you can’t, I’d love to help you find them! Because we could all really use them right about now.