The best compliment I have received was "You're the strongest person I know."
I have always been known for my strength, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I can open even the most stubborn of pickle jars.
I think I would make for the sweetest Drill Seargent you ever dropped and gave 20 for. This vision is my description of embodying the strengths of both my masculine and feminine energies (which we all have within us.) The flipside is I believe that the weaknesses within the dualities are taught. I will elaborate on those in future posts, spoiler alert!
In this piece, I will address the first point that led to this concept of reframing weakness, my personal issues with it, and in others, and working to shift my perception. Once perception of self evolves, our perspectives will change externally.
I have always encapsulated a strength for which I became known for. I became weakened when I truly began to tap into my empathic abilities. I was taking on other's pains, whilst my own emotions were coming in hot from some foreign place. I had never experienced such connectivity before and my boundaries disappeared. My mind was trying to piece everything together. It was like Matt Damon writing out equations in Good Will Hunting, trying to understand and rationalize all the downloads I was receiving, while looking for grounding influences through false certainties. I listened to others who knew no better than I and egos naturally clashed. Nor did they truly know my heart and it's enduring strength. Remember, adults are just a bunch of kids with unresolved traumas that play out on repeat until they deal with them. So, don't fuck up your children folks! No pressure.
The irony of it all and the obvious point of going through an awakening or however you resonate with the experience, is you realize your greatest strength(s) lies within your weakness(es.) Here I am now, putting off writing formally for years aside from aspects of my previous professional endeavors, with not only fodder to use as a way to connect with you, but a way of cathartic release. To be fearless in what I say, but mindful in how I say it because this is a growth process and I can't claim to have ever been particularly salacious in my delivery, is very empowering. It is a fun challenge to look at something such as weakness from an egoic angle and write it out until my heart gets to the root of the matter and choosing to communicate in this way.
Though my previous (and still sometimes) perspective of weakness is derived from frustration with others, as in I believe I could swiftly lob someone's head off (my ego also thinks I was a samurai in a past life) for continually doing the following:
A. Failing to see their own greatness
B. Projecting their pain and low self-esteem onto others
C. Falling into the victim mentality and latch onto 'stronger' people to enable them.
I believe we choose to be weak to stay in our shadows. There is a sad comfort in the darkness because it is perceived as 'easy.' Accepting things as they are is true, yes, but it is your viewpoint of them and your actions are what differentiate the strong and the weak. If you don't do the work, you will stay lazy and stagnant. Blaming externally and always having this underlying resentment toward life because YOU chose NOT to empower yourself and then you are unable to help others. I see that now, so here I am, writing fearlessly and sharing it publicly, so we can resonate and grow together.
Kindness, compassion, and selflessness are aligned with strength, which is akin to integrity. I think we have all at some point acted in ways that we could perceive as weak and we simply must realign ourselves with our integrity and learn from the lessons bestowed upon us.