Personal Perspective: From performative composure and grit to authenticity.
We often believe being strong means pushing through — pushing past the pain, pressure, and grief, and meeting the expectation to hold it all together. And I was good at it.
I am a psychiatric nurse practitioner, a business owner, a wife, and a mother of seven. I seamlessly held space for others while quietly processing my own pain, until the day my third child died.
What followed wasn’t emotional resilience, the way we are taught to perform it. Instead, it was raw, slow, real, and non-linear. It was the beginning of a journey that would challenge everything I thought I knew about mental health and mental and emotional strength.
This isn’t a story of breakdown. It is a story of revelation, and of discovering that true strength isn’t about pushing harder, but about pausing long enough to see yourself clearly and choosing to live on in purpose.
My journey through grief was unthinkable. I lost three of my seven children and my husband. That sentence alone seems impossible to hold, but I have lived it. What made it more complicated is that I am also a mental health professional. I have the degrees, the training, and the clinical tools. And yet, none of it prepared me for the level of soul pain I was carrying.
In the beginning, I relied on what I knew — routines, responsibilities, and pushing forward with grit and determination. I kept showing up for others, but I was struggling; strong on the outside and spinning on the inside.
What I came to realize is that “strength,” as we often traditionally define it, was never meant to carry grief. It was never meant to hold the spiritual weight of betrayal, trauma, exhaustion, or confusion. What I needed wasn’t another coping strategy. I needed a complete mental reset. I needed to redefine what it meant to be mentally strong.
That is when the real journey began. The answers I was searching for were not found in a textbook or in a clinical lab. It was uncovered in the quiet hours of reflection, in conversations with God, and in the stillness that comes after everything else falls away.
I remember the day my son Reggie was diagnosed with DRPLA, a very rare genetic condition. Then my daughter and husband were also diagnosed. The genetic shadow of the disease was terrifying, but it was my son who bore the symptoms: catastrophic seizures, neurological decline, things no child should have to endure. It had been several years since my other son Johnny died in a drowning accident, and I couldn’t help but think, “Is this a curse?” I didn’t dare say it out loud, but I felt it in my bones.
At that time, I did what I was trained to do. I implemented every cognitive-behavioral technique I knew. I kept the routines. I kept showing up. I kept pushing through. From the outside, I looked like a mother coping with steadfast grace. A clinician with tools. A woman with strength.
But inside, I was unraveling.
There were moments—late nights in hospitals, early mornings trying to pretend it was just another day—when I felt like I was standing on a fault line that could split open at any moment. And still, I kept pushing. I thought that was what strong people did. I thought if I stopped, I would fail—fail as a mother, a clinician, a human being.
What I didn’t realize was that my definition of mental strength was incomplete.
After my son Reggie’s death from DRPLA in 2016, I was finally able to breathe. The grief didn’t vanish, but the constant urgency and chaos lifted for just a moment. And in that space, something new began to stir. I found myself journaling not just about what I had been through, but about how I had survived it; what had held me together and kept me from falling apart completely.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to trace the outline of a different kind of strength, one birthed in vulnerability and self-examination.
Then, my daughter Miah died in her sleep.
It was a loss so sudden, so surreal, that it broke whatever scaffolding I had managed to construct around my grief. But in the wreckage, something unexpected happened. The journey stopped being about mental health and started becoming about the soul.
I began to see strength differently. Not as a performance, nor as composure, but as something sacred and internal. Something that came from clarity, from honesty, from surrender. It wasn’t about pushing through anymore. It was about pausing long enough to ask myself better questions:
What am I actually carrying? What am I pretending not to feel? Who am I, beneath my responsibilities and roles?
And perhaps the most powerful question of all: What would it mean to live intentionally—even here, even now, even after all of this?
In the years since, I’ve come to understand that real healing doesn’t just happen with time. It happens with intention. We must learn to think through our problems efficiently, not endlessly, to honor our grief without being consumed by it, and to move trauma through the body and not just talk about it. Organizing the chaos in our minds is not about perfection. It is about being able to make decisions that align with what we truly want, and what our soul already knows we need. This is not quick work. But it is sacred work.
If you are reading this and quietly nodding, I want to offer you something that isn’t advice, but a question:
What would it look like if your strength didn’t come from holding it all together, but from letting yourself fall into something deeper?
You don’t need to break to begin again, but you do need to pause. You need space to see what you are carrying, what you believe, and what you’ve been avoiding.
We don’t find strength by bypassing pain. We find it by meeting ourselves in the truth of it—fully, honestly, without performance.
As a mental health clinician, I believed my training would protect me. It didn’t. But it did give me the language to rebuild.
The real work—life-saving, soul-returning work—came when I stopped trying to fix myself and started learning to understand myself.
That is the invitation I leave you with: whatever you are carrying, you don’t have to carry it alone. But you do have to face it. Not with fear — with authenticity. That is where mental strength lives.