Retreat Life & Reflection

I Was the Strong One for Decades. It Nearly Cost Me Everything.

Soft girl era. You have probably seen the phrase by now, floating around the internet, usually attached to a woman in her twenties or thirties choosing ease, choosing slowness, choosing herself. It sounds lovely. To women like me, it also sounds like a foreign language.

I am a successful Black woman in my fifties. Softness was never on the menu for us. We were raised to be strong, capable, and twice as good. We built our whole careers on being the one who could handle it all; the one who never dropped the ball. Nobody taught us how to lay it down. There is no era we get to age into where the world finally says: you have done enough, you can rest now.

And it is not only our own households that lean on us. We are the ones the family calls in a crisis, the ones the community turns to, the ones expected to hold the line for our people and, somehow, for the whole country too. Right now, when so much in the world feels like it is coming apart, the asking has only grown louder. Black women are still handed the hardest problems, trusted to find a way like we always have. Choosing to put ourselves first in a season like this feels almost unthinkable. It feels like we are turning our backs on the people who count on us.

So, for decades, I lived without softness. I was a mother raising children, a daughter tending to her parents, a wife. I was an expert in my field, and a business owner with a large team of staff. I was whoever the moment required me to be, and there was no corner of my life where I got to just be soft. No place where I wasn’t in charge. No place where I could set the weight down.

Maybe you know her. Maybe you are her. The woman everyone leans on. The one who holds it together so well that nobody thinks to ask who is holding her.

I called it strength, and for a long time that felt true. Strength was the word everyone gave it, including me. What lived underneath that word was something plainer and more costly. Every time life handed me a problem, I answered it by working harder. Every uncertainty, I met by preparing more. Every crack, I sealed by carrying more of the load myself. Sustained competence under sustained pressure, day after day, year after year. I kept my grip when everything in me wanted to loosen it. I coped with impossible conditions the only way I knew how: by out-working them, running on sheer will. The logic ran underneath everything: if I could be good enough, prepared enough, strong enough, if I could carry it all and keep anything from falling apart, then one day I would finally feel safe. I believed that for decades. But sadly, it was never going to be true.

It wore me down in ways I couldn’t really see in the moment. My playfulness faded. The whimsy left. I got quieter, heavier, lonelier. I was tired in a way that a few good nights of sleep cannot fix. Every day became a copy of the one before it. I was way out of balance. I was being ground into dust, but I was too busy holding the line to notice.

I did try to build softness into my life. I turned every home I ever lived in into a sanctuary. Beautiful bathrooms, elegant bedrooms, soft blankets, candles, lamps on dimmers. Soft spaces to enjoy that glass of wine to close out the night. And it was never enough, because the softness never made it past my skin. My rooms were tender. My spirit was still standing guard.

When it all fell apart

Everything came to a grinding halt. I was unable to function at the same level. I didn’t have the mental space to carry all the things required of me. I collapsed, emotionally and physically. I lost the drive and capacity to keep pushing the heavy rock up the mountain alone in my work and in my marriage. My joints hurt, but I didn’t have the energy to put in the work needed to make them feel better. I suffered for years with a chronic sinus condition, but I did not have the energy to keep searching for relief. My weight wouldn’t move no matter what I did. My body had been carrying what my will refused to put down, and it finally gave out.

I needed a different life.

It has a name

For the longest time, I thought all of that meant I had failed. That underneath the accomplishments, I simply was not as strong as everyone believed.

Then I learned that the way I had been coping had a name. Epidemiologist Dr. Sherman James called it John Henryism: a strong disposition toward high-effort, active coping with persistent social and economic stress.

They named it for John Henry, the Black folk hero who, according to legend, raced a steam-powered drill and won, only to die after the contest. We often tell his story as a celebration of strength and determination. It is also a warning about what happens when a human body is pushed too hard for too long. 

The complicated truth is that high-effort coping can work. It can help us achieve, endure, solve difficult problems, and protect the people who depend on us. That success can make it difficult to recognize what the strategy is costing us. The health risk is not determination itself. The risk emerges when relentless effort becomes our primary answer to chronic adversity, without enough safety, support, control, resources, or recovery.

That was the part I recognized in myself. Every time the strategy worked, I had another reason to keep using it. I succeeded, so I kept pushing. I kept pushing, so almost no one could see how much effort it took to remain standing.

There is a name for this pull as Black women carry it. Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé calls it the Superwoman Schema, the deep obligation so many of us feel to project unshakable strength, suppress our own needs, and succeed against long odds while holding everyone else up. The role protects us and the people we love. But, at the same time, it exacts a quiet toll, straining our relationships and settling stress deep into our bodies.

Dr. Arline Geronimus gave us another word for the larger process: weathering. She developed the framework to explain how repeated exposure to social, economic, and political inequality can produce earlier deterioration across the body’s systems. Weathering is not simply the result of having a stressful life. It is the cumulative physical cost of having to adapt, again and again, to conditions shaped by racism, marginalization, economic pressure, and social exclusion.

Researchers often examine this accumulated wear through allostatic load, a measure that brings together indicators from several of the body’s regulatory systems. In one national study, Black women in midlife had the highest probability of elevated allostatic load among the race-and-gender groups studied, whether they were poor or not.

These ideas cannot prove that weathering caused every symptom I experienced. They gave me a more honest context for understanding why decades of high-effort coping were never physically or emotionally free.

My collapse was not evidence that I had failed. It showed me that willpower cannot substitute indefinitely for safety, support, and recovery.

So, if you are reading this and have your own version of these symptoms – the aches, the sleeplessness, the weight gain or loss, the exhaustion – please take your body seriously. Symptoms like these deserve medical attention. Understanding the context of our lives should deepen our care, not replace it.

And hear me plainly: struggling does not mean you are weak. It may mean you have been required to remain strong for a very long time under conditions that were never fair to you. Your body may not be betraying you. It may be asking you to listen.

Toward sacred eldership

Learning that changed the question I was living by. For years it was “how much more can I carry?” Now it is “what kind of life would let my body finally stop proving that I can survive?”

I have started calling this next season “sacred eldership.” I choose those words with deep intention. Eldership because, in my tradition, the elder is the one people turn to. She is the keeper of wisdom, the one who has lived long enough to be trusted, the one who leads through experience and discernment. And sacred, because I want to treat this chapter as a calling. Something rooted in spirit, tended with care, and honored as holy. For most of my life, growing older felt like something we outrun. I am choosing to walk into it like an inheritance.

This isn’t one more job I am taking on. That would just be the old life wearing new robes, more doing, more performing, more being everything for everyone under a prettier name. This season asks the opposite of me. It asks me to slow down and finally tend to the woman who spent decades tending to everyone else.

I want less speed and less spectacle. Less controlling every outcome, less being visible all the time. I feel myself turning toward the quieter work: listening, holding space, writing, going deeper spiritually. I want to feel like a whole human being again, and I want to lead without sacrificing my body or my essence to do it. I want to be loved and held in ways that remind me I’m worthy, even when I feel my most broken. I need softness in this new chapter of my life.

There is a second half to this, though. An elder rests, yes, and she also remembers the road well enough to guide the women coming up behind her. So, part of my own healing is doing it in the open. Every boundary I set, every time I choose myself, every awkward step toward softness lays a little more light on the path for the next sister who believed she had to carry it all alone.

As a high-performing Black woman who has held so much power and responsibility, I am clumsy at this softness thing. But I do it anyway. And I am not figuring this out alone. I am doing the work with my therapist, who is a Black woman in the same age group. I am maneuvering this season with several sisters who I love and respect, and we are healing together. I am building a real plan instead of a wish. Because my life literally depends on learning it.

It’s not easy. There is no roadmap for this. Women like me are learning it late, and mostly on our own, because we have run out of other options. Softness is not a trend for us. It is truly about survival. The emotional roller coaster is a bumpy ride. The reverting to old habits happens. And the anger and resentment that crops up when I realize what I’ve lost and what I need to rebuild is real. Some days, there aren’t words to explain the unlearning process happening from within. One day, I just needed to be held close and reassured during a particularly difficult moment, but I didn’t know how to ask for it calmly. What spilled out was an undignified avalanche of tears that came so fast, I could hardly breathe. I was supported well in the moment, and it showed me that the people walking alongside us are living with the effects of our healing journey too.

Choosing softness while the world feels like it is on fire can seem selfish, like stepping back while your people still need you. I have wrestled with that guilt more nights than I can count. But a woman running on empty has nothing left to give anyone.

The elders who carried us struggled to put things down too. We tell their stories like they were unbreakable. They were not. The women who came before us had their health scares, their failing joints, their private breakdowns, their bodies giving out years too soon. They carried it in silence, and only the people closest to them ever knew the real cost. Nobody gave them permission to rest, so most of them never took it. The sacred eldership I am reaching for was owed to them too. 

I love them too much to repeat that silence. If I want to be here for my people for the long haul, for the fights that are not going anywhere, I have to do the thing they were rarely allowed to do. I must put the weight down. And I have to say so out loud, so the women coming after me know they can too.

So I am drawing the map as I walk it. These are my first steps.

My soft era non-negotiables

• Rest lives on the schedule. I protect rest the way I would protect any other commitment, so my body can learn safety through repetition instead of only getting a break after I fall apart.
• I’m done being indispensable. My wisdom does not require me to personally hold every detail of everything I touch. Some things get delegated, some get boundaries, some get to end. Being needed is not the same as being worthy.
• My relationships have to run both ways. I let other grown adults carry their own weight instead of leaning heavily on me, and I let myself be cared for without treating it like a debt I must repay.
• I choose rooms where I don’t have to defend my humanity. Spaces where I do not translate myself, justify my expertise, shrink my language, or brace for how someone reads my Blackness, my authority, or my spirit. That freedom is the whole heart of what I am building at Ayoku.
• Grief and anger get a seat at the table. Grief keeps showing me what the old life cost. Anger keeps pointing at where my dignity got crossed. I will not let them drive, and I have stopped pretending they have nothing to teach me.
• My health comes with me. I pay attention to my sleep, my blood pressure, my pain, my energy, and my mood, and I do so with real compassion for the life that shaped my body.
• Beauty and comfort don’t have to be earned. I enjoy softness without believing I have to buy it, display it, or work myself into the ground to deserve it.

The life I’m building

I spent most of my life becoming the woman who could shoulder big responsibilities and handle hard things. I learned to see trouble coming, carry the weight, protect everyone, and to stay composed while I was falling apart on the inside. Those instincts let me build, lead, provide, and survive. I honor her. She got me here. And I finally understand what she cost me.

I am not organizing my life around how much I can carry anymore. I am organizing it around what keeps me whole. My softness is going to live in scheduled rest, in relationships that give back, in work I can sustain, in a little financial breathing room, in telling the truth about my feelings, in spiritual grounding, in plain everyday joy. I will keep doing meaningful work for the rest of my life, but at a pace that lets me actually live inside the life I am making.

I am allowed to be cared for. I am allowed to change my mind. I am allowed to disappoint people whose expectations were built on me over functioning. I am allowed to feel grief and anger and tenderness and pleasure and joy without turning every one of them into a task.

And so are you. None of us were handed a map for this, so I am drawing mine out loud, in case it helps you start your own. You do not have to earn your softness. You do not have to wait until you have proven enough.

My soft girl era is the end of proving I can survive hard things.

It is the beginning of building a life where I don’t have to. And I am saving you a seat.

Endnotes

James, S. A., Hartnett, S. A., and Kalsbeek, W. D. “John Henryism and Blood Pressure Differences Among Black Men.” Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 1983.

Woods-Giscombé, C. L. “Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health.” Qualitative Health Research, 2010.

Geronimus, A. T. “The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of African-American Women and Infants: Evidence and Speculations.” Ethnicity & Disease, 1992.

Geronimus, A. T., Hicken, M., Keene, D., and Bound, J. “‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores Among Blacks and Whites in the United States.” American Journal of Public Health, 2006.