Strong does not mean struggle-free

Steph West was one of the advance readers of Writing Myself Home, and she very kindly sent me a photograph of herself holding the hard copy.

At first, I simply thought it was a fabulous photograph. But it felt like more than that. Steph looks so strong. And she is.

I also know something of what it takes to stand there in that uniform, pipes under your arm, looking completely at home in a world that has not always made it easy for women to find their place.

Then I realised what was driving my reaction to the “strongness” I was seeing. So much of what Steph had recognised most deeply in my story was struggle.

When the problem must be you

A chapter in Writing Myself Home describes a guesting experience in Spain that spoke to the heart of one of my own struggles.

I was playing pipes that felt impossibly hard. Other, very experienced pipers played them for me and said they were fine. So, naturally, I assumed the problem was me.

What none of us knew was that there was a tiny crack in the stock. Tiny crack. No biggie. Except cracks expand as things heat up, and in close-to-40-degree Spanish heat, I may as well have drilled a hole in the set.

There was something else happening that none of us could see.

I was at a stage of my life when my hormones had apparently decided that, since I no longer needed them for reproduction, their work was done. They left home, taking my memory and a fair amount of my emotional and mental stability with them.

So, there I was, blaming myself for all of it, while both my pipes and I were dealing with things that were real, but invisible.

That is a particularly difficult kind of struggle. When there is no obvious explanation for what is happening, and everyone around you seems able to manage perfectly well, self-doubt slips very easily into the space where an answer should be. You stop asking what might be wrong and begin assuming that something is wrong with you.

What I could not see at the time

Towards the end of that chapter, after days of fighting those pipes, something inexplicably came together for the final performance.

By then, I had developed what felt like a six-pack from trying to blow those leaking pipes. I remember wondering whether that had finally done the trick, or whether the female gods had convened an emergency meeting and decided to give me one last shot of estrogen out of sheer sympathy.

It still makes me laugh.

But five years later, when I wrote that chapter, I understood something I could not understand while I was living it. At the time, I thought I was failing at something I should have been able to do. Looking back, I could see how many different things I had been carrying, including some I did not yet have the knowledge or language to name.

Writing the story didn't change what had happened. It changed my understanding of the woman it happened to. I could finally look back at her with a little more compassion.

And then Steph read it.

The moment someone recognises your story

Different country. Different life. Different circumstances.

But she recognised the feeling. Steph told me about reaching a point in her own piping when music she knew seemed to disappear from her memory. Her pipes suddenly felt foreign, and she quietly began wondering whether perhaps she had reached her “best before” date as a piper.

She had not. But I knew that feeling. I knew what it was to find yourself struggling with something that had once felt familiar. I knew the private questions that follow. Is this temporary? Am I losing something? Was I ever as capable as I thought? Has everyone else noticed?

Perhaps that is why seeing my book in Steph’s hands feels so powerful to me. The woman in that photograph is strong. Nothing about what we see is false. But she has also struggled. Those two things can exist in exactly the same person.

What we cannot see from the outside

We look at people who appear confident, capable and accomplished, perhaps even formidable, and imagine that this must also be how they experience themselves on the inside.

But it is not always. I have spent a great deal of my own life looking far more certain from the outside than I felt on the inside.

There have been times when people have seen confidence while I have been working hard simply to hold my ground. They have seen competence while I have been questioning whether I still knew what I was doing. They have seen strength without seeing what that strength was costing me.

This is not because the strength was an act. Strength and struggle are not opposites. Sometimes strength is what other people see while struggle is what we are living. Sometimes it is built through the struggle. Sometimes it is simply what keeps us standing while we try to understand what is happening.

And sometimes the strongest-looking person in the room is still quietly wondering whether she belongs there.

The gift of being recognised

Perhaps that is why sharing our stories matters. Not because our stories are the same. They never are. But occasionally, someone puts words around an experience we have been carrying by ourselves, or thought we were carrying by ourselves.

Suddenly, there is recognition. You too? There is something profoundly relieving in that moment. Not because another person’s struggle solves our own, but because it interrupts the isolation of it.

Someone else has stood in a different version of the same difficult place. Someone else has questioned herself while appearing capable to everyone around her. Someone else has wondered whether she was past her best, only to discover that she was moving through something she could not yet see or name. Someone else understands.

I think that may be one of the greatest gifts of connection. To discover that strength does not exclude struggle. That struggle does not invalidate strength. And that being seen can begin with someone else being willing to say, “This happened to me too.”

Thank you, Steph, for trusting me with your story and for allowing me to share this wonderful photograph. I hope our paths eventually cross somewhere with pipes in our hands and that long-promised glass of wine nearby.

Writing Myself Home: From Silence to Voice is available at Takealot and Amazon, in PDF format and for Kindle.