Strong enough to be weak
How do you prepare someone who’s spent their entire life clawing at perfection to eventually face the fact that they’re inherently imperfect? To be honest, I couldn’t tell you–I’m still trying to figure it out for myself.
This year has been exceedingly difficult for me as I’ve had to come to terms with that reality in ways that I never anticipated. When beginning junior year, I set high expectations for myself, intending to curate and manipulate every facet of what my life would look like. I wanted straight A’s, I wanted flawless time management, I wanted a healthy mind, I wanted seamless functioning, I wanted perfection. But as it goes, life has a way of making choices for you–quietly undoing the ones you thought were set in stone. Things don’t follow the outline you spent so long perfecting. They slip and they shift, and suddenly you’re off track, staring at a version of your life that looks nothing like what you planned.
That “slip” wasn’t just about falling behind or losing control. It was my mental health–a chemical imbalance and diagnosed illness that I wanted to treat like a simple mistake. I wanted to believe I had simply lost focus or that everything would go back to normal if I simply tried hard enough, but the honest truth was that my “normal” had never been so normal at all.
Normal had become a version of my life where pushing myself beyond limits was an expectation, not an exception. Where exhaustion felt like evidence for my effort, and anything less felt like failure. I had built–what I thought was a functioning–routine centered around overextending myself and convincing myself that overextension was sustainable (or even admirable). But in the face of my mental health, I was shot down more times than I can count–moments where I thought I could finally do enough, be enough, only to be reminded that I’m still human. And for someone who’s spent so long equating worth with perfection, that realization doesn’t come naturally.
I didn’t end junior year with the academic success I had expected or even an image of myself that I had predicted. Instead, I ended with proof that my limits were not theoretical and were, in fact, real and unavoidable. I spent months holding myself to a standard that was hardly achievable for a healthy version of my mind, but beat myself up when the struggling version couldn’t pull through. I kept trying–not in the way I needed to, but in a way that I was used to. I kept chasing strength in the form I had always understood it: forcing my body back to “normal”, pushing myself through exhaustion, trying to replicate a version of myself that no longer existed in the same way. I defined “strength” as being able to function at the same pace and produce the same success. But that version of strength was never built to hold me through this. It begged me to ignore what my mind was telling me and to treat every signal to slow down as something to overcome instead of understand. Confined to that definition of strength, I suffocated within the same cycle: working harder, trying more, but collapsing under the unrealistic expectations I refused to adjust.
In the middle of one of my breakdowns at school, I sought out my English teacher–a woman who’s intelligence and wisdom continue to baffle me no matter how many times I’m on the receiving end. As I was expressing my disappointment in how my junior year turned out, she said something that stood out to me: “Izzy, you’ve spent this entire year showing up and forcing yourself to be strong. But now, it’s time you learn how to be strong enough to be weak.”
At first, it felt so contradictory. Weakness was the exact thing I spent years trying to outrun, something I associated with failure, with falling short of the person I thought I was supposed to be. Strength, to me, had always meant endurance. It meant pushing through no matter what and holding everything together even when it hurt. However, what my teacher was asking of me required something completely different. It required me to practice honesty and recognize that the version of myself I was so desperately trying to return to wasn’t sustainable in the first place.
“Strong enough to be weak” doesn’t mean giving up. It means surrendering to a constant battle against myself. That surrender is a choice I’ve had to be strong enough to make. It means unlearning all the ways I’ve taught myself to measure worth and instead, sitting in the uncertainty of letting go. It means building up enough courage to watch myself stray from the illusion of perfection–to witness the unraveling of everything I once believed made me valuable. There’s something almost disorienting about that unraveling. It doesn’t feel indicative of progress in the ways I learned to recognize it. It looks slower and kinder, like pausing when I would’ve pushed and choosing rest without having to earn it. I’m realizing that what I once called “falling behind” might actually be the first time I’ve stopped running. That stillness isn’t laziness or emptiness–it’s space. Space to notice that I am not the sum of what I produce, not the sharp edges of my expectations, and not the constant tightening of my own standards.
I’m coming to believe that maybe the strongest version of me isn’t the one who holds everything together, but the one who is brave enough to let it fall apart and trust that what rebuilds in its place will be something truer, something steadier, and something finally at peace with imperfection.
