Feel How Strong You Are

Every Wednesday morning, my favorite pilates instructor calls out the same phrase of encouragement at least five times.

“Feel how strong you are!”

She doesn’t use it sparingly, but she uses it with intention. In the hardest moments, when we’ve been shaking in our planks for what feels like forever and might be tempted to give up, she calls us to push a little further, to stay inside the discomfort just long enough to stop and appreciate what we’re made of.

You move through the world differently when you know how strong you are.

I was twenty-three when I decided to leave my marriage and, with it, the church that had been my spiritual and social center for each of those twenty-three years. It felt like my world was ending because in so many ways it was. I spent long nights weeping, collapsed alone on the broken tiles of our bathroom floor, unsure if the sun would bother to rise again, or if I would ever be able to pick myself up.

But it did. And I did.

That season of my life broke me open in ways I am still trying to make sense of. I look forward to the day when I stop talking about it, stop writing about it. I don’t know if I ever will. But I pray I’ll never forget the two truths I found among the broken bits once I’d picked myself up off that bathroom floor and started picking up the pieces of my shattered world. Because even now, when it feels like my world is ending, I come back to these two truths: the sun will rise tomorrow, and I’m stronger than I think I am.

I am proudly, and loudly, progressive. I don’t believe that anyone should be left without food, housing, or healthcare, and I don’t think you should have to earn your dignity through labor to deserve those things.

A few weeks ago, a friend who is a little more conservative and a lot more pragmatic than I am challenged me on the better world that I imagine. He agrees that everyone deserves dignity, but he’s concerned with human flourishing. And the way he sees it, challenge and sacrifice aren’t just noble additions to a good life; they are the foundation. The glass that holds the sundae, not the cherries on top.

Can a human really flourish without working hard? Without ever being challenged?

Agreeing with him felt as uncomfortable as it did unavoidable.

Then last week, in my Black Spirituality and Religion class, we read a chapter from James Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues where he pushed this idea even further, centering human flourishing not just on challenge, but on the experience and survival of real suffering. Cone’s argument, grounded in the experience of Black Americans, is that love and life can be truly experienced and truly appreciated only by those who have experienced true suffering.

Cone writes: “Because we know that we have survived, that we have not been destroyed, and that we are more than the stripes on our backs, we can sing as a way of celebrating our being....People cannot love physically and spiritually until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.”

There is something undeniably true about Cone’s argument; that singing for Black people, even when you’re singing the blues, is a matter of celebrating and affirming our very beings. That when you’ve survived true suffering, being itself becomes something to celebrate. But I can’t help but wonder if suffering is actually a prerequisite of love, or if it might be a sharpening, an edge, a limit you have to visit to learn what you are capable of.

Are we stronger for having suffered, or do we know how strong we are because we know what we survived? Are we incapable of love before we’ve been broken, or do we just know how to love better and how to cherish people more when we understand how tender a human heart can be? 

Maybe letting myself collapse on that cold bathroom floor and watch my tears collect between the grout lines of those broken tiles made me stronger the same way the last 8 seconds of those Wednesday morning planks do. Maybe I was building the muscle I needed to live with more gratitude and love with more depth. Or maybe these moments on the floor are just opportunities to feel how strong I am.

I don’t believe that suffering is what makes us strong, and I don’t believe that hard work is what makes us worthy. But I’m warming to the idea that in order to truly flourish, we’ve got to know how strong we are.

Feel how strong you are. 

I’m in a season of life where I need this reminder daily. When I decided to apply to divinity school, I knew I would be challenged in more ways than one. A demanding master’s program after a decade away from the classroom. A new city, 3,000 miles from home. Working earnestly to lay the foundations of a writing career in hopes of making my dreams come true.

I’m still drinking out of a firehose. Challenged. Isolated. Exhausted. Inspired. Grateful. And somehow still thirsty. 

Including undergrad, it took me 9 semesters at Harvard to get a 4.0. To be fair, it also took me 9 semesters to really reach for it instead of telling myself the gap between an A and a B wasn't worth the effort. That’s the thing about limits, though, you don’t find out what you’re capable of until you actually reach for them.

The cool thing about holding a plank until it burns, or surviving a season that you thought might undo you, is that you don’t just feel your strength in those moments while it hurts. You get to carry it with you. You move through your day differently, you make decisions differently, and you love differently, because you know what you’re capable of.

Every Wednesday morning, my favorite pilates instructor calls it out at least five times. In the hardest moments, when you think you might not make it:

"Feel how strong you are."