The Hidden Cost of Being the Strong One

People often praise the person who always shows up, handles things quietly, and keeps everything steady when life becomes difficult. But very rarely do we talk about the hidden cost of being the strong one.

In this episode, Kim reflects on what it means to grow up learning to carry things quietly and how that pattern can follow us into adulthood. Through personal stories about childhood, health challenges, family life, and faith, she explores how strength can sometimes look steady on the outside while requiring tremendous effort underneath the surface.

This conversation looks honestly at the physical and emotional toll of holding everything in, while also offering a hopeful perspective on what it looks like to begin carrying life differently. Strength doesn’t have to mean doing everything alone.

Sometimes the most courageous form of strength is allowing other people to walk beside you.

Expanded Show Notes

For many people, being known as “the strong one” becomes part of their identity.

They are dependable, steady, and capable in difficult situations. They show up for others, solve problems, and carry responsibilities without asking for much in return. From the outside, this kind of strength often looks admirable.

But what people rarely see is the cost.

In this episode, Kim reflects on the quiet ways that strength can form early in life and how those patterns sometimes lead us to carry far more than we were ever meant to hold alone.

Through personal stories — including childhood experiences, writing as a way of processing emotions, pushing through serious health challenges, and learning to accept help in everyday moments — this episode explores the difference between resilience and exhaustion.

You’ll hear reflections on:

• growing up learning to stay quiet and not inconvenience others
 • the emotional and physical toll of holding feelings in
 • how health crises can reveal the limits of pushing through
 • learning to accept help from the people around us
 • the role of faith and community in healing
 • redefining strength in a healthier way

This episode is a gentle invitation for anyone who has spent a long time being the strong one.

Strength was never meant to be carried alone.

Continue the Journey (Show Notes Section)

If this conversation resonated with you, you may also want to listen to:

Episode 12 — Letting God Hold What You Can’t
A reflection on releasing the weight we’ve been carrying and trusting God with what was never ours to manage alone.

Episode 14 — When Your Body Speaks
An exploration of how physical symptoms sometimes reveal deeper emotional or spiritual needs for healing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey friends, there's a sentence that has been sitting with me for a while now. The more I think about it, the more I realize how many people quietly live inside of it. People praise strength and showing up for others, but they rarely talk about the hidden cost of being the strong psilocype. Most of us know someone like that. Sometimes we admire them because they seem steady no matter what life throws at them. They're dependable, they handle things, they show up when other people fall apart. From the outside, that can look like resilience, maturity, and maybe even wisdom. But what some people don't always see is what kind of strength often requires it requires from the person carrying it. When you become the strong one, especially early in life, you usually learn how to hold a lot of things in. You learn how to stay calm when situations around you feel chaotic, and you learn how to take care of other people's emotions without always having space to process your own. Over time, that begins to look normal, and sometimes it even looks like you've got everything figured out. The truth is that holding things in for years has a cost. Sometimes that cost shows up emotionally, but very often it shows up physically as well. People who spend years carrying stress quietly often deal with frequent illnesses, headaches, stomach issues, or that constant tension that sometimes seems to live in your shoulders and never really goes away. The body has a way of carrying what the heart never had room to say out loud. For a long time, you may not even recognize what's happening. You just keep doing what you've always done, which is showing up, handling things, and trying not to add more problems to an already complicated world. But eventually something begins to shift. You start realizing that being strong all the time isn't the same as being healthy, and that strength by itself was never meant to be a life strategy. Today I want to talk about what happens when you've spent a long time being the strong one and what it looks like to begin learning a different way of carrying life. When I think back on where this pattern probably started for me, I don't remember a single moment where someone sat me down and told me that I was the strong one. It was more subtle than that. I spent a lot of time around adults when I was young, and I was often praised for being seen and not heard. At the time, it just felt like that was the right way to exist in a room. There was a lot of grief around me early in life, loss of family members, divorces, and other hard things that adults were navigating. I learned quickly that the best way to move through these environments was to stay quiet and not rock the boat. So I tried to do everything well. I didn't want to create problems or surprise anyone by doing something that they weren't expecting. I wanted to make life easier for the people around me, even though I probably couldn't have explained that at the time. Looking back now, I can see that it slowly shaped the way I handled my own emotions too. Instead of bringing things into the open, I learned to deal with them internally and keep moving forward. One of the places that started showing up was in my right was in writing. I've always been a writer and a heavy reader, even when I was very young. Writing became a place where I could process things that I didn't necessarily say out loud. I remember being told years later that when I was in the second or third grade, I had written a story about a frog committing suicide. I've never actually seen that story myself, so I don't know what was going on in my little second grade brain at the time, but clearly something was being processed somewhere. Reading and writing were the spaces where I naturally gravitated. Math was never that place for me. I decided very early on that I wasn't good at it, and once that belief took hold, it was very hard to undo. So instead I leaned into the things that felt natural stories, books, words, and the quiet world that exists inside your own mind when you're reading or writing. One of the things that came along with that quiet strength was this deep instinct not to inconvenience anyone. I didn't want to create problems or make life harder for the people around me. And I think that showed up earlier than I realized at the time. Around the same season when my parents divorced, I was in a part of a Girl Scout group, or maybe it was Brownies. I don't remember all the details, but I remember one moment very clearly. I remember the little meeting room, the folding chairs, and the way those kinds of announcements always seemed exciting for everyone else. One month they scheduled a father-daughter event for the troupe, and at that point my dad was living in another state. I remember feeling this wave of anxiety about the whole thing. Not because my dad wouldn't have loved me enough to kind of show up if he could, but because the idea of asking him to fly in for a single event felt like too much. My mom told me that my uncle could take me instead, and I'm sure she meant that as a loving solution, but even that felt uncomfortable for me. What I remember most clearly was not wanting to be different. I didn't want to explain why my dad wasn't there. I didn't want to be the kid whose situation needed extra extra explanation. So instead of figuring out a way to go, I quietly quit the troupe. I just stopped going and never went back. And the truth is I never even asked my dad about the event. I made the decision completely on my own and just removed myself from the situation. There may have been things set around me at the time that made me assume that it wouldn't work out anyway, but the reality is I didn't even give him a chance to answer. I just quietly adjusted myself to the situation and moved on. Looking back now, I can see how early that instinct showed up in me. It wasn't any that anyone told me that I couldn't ask for help. It was that somewhere along the way I had already learned it was easier to adjust myself than to risk inconveniencing someone else. For most of my life, I've been the low maintenance person. You know the people that are described as being easygoing or independent, the person who doesn't ask for much and usually just figures things out. And while that can sound like a compliment, what I've learned over time is that sometimes being the low maintenance person simply means that you've gotten very good at taking care of your own needs quietly so that no one else has to carry them. When I think about that season now, the image that comes to mind isn't really an iceberg. Icebergs sit still, but they're very deep under the water. What it felt more like was treading water. From the outside, everything can look calm and steady, but underneath the surface, you're kicking constantly to stay afloat. For a long time, that's what strength looked like for me. Staying steady on the surface and working very hard underneath to keep everything from sinking. And when you live that way long enough, quietly managing your own emotions while trying not to add weight to anyone else's, you start getting very good at keeping things below the surface. At the time, it doesn't feel like you're doing anything unusual. It just feels like you're handling life the best way you know how. But what I didn't realize for a long time is that when emotions don't have a place to be processed, they don't just disappear. They settle somewhere. Sometimes they settle in places that we don't notice right away. For a lot of people who grow up learning to keep things in, the body eventually becomes a place where pressure shows up. Headaches become common, stomach issues appear, you get sick more often than other people seem to. There can be this constant tension of living in your shoulders or your neck, like your body has been bracing for something for years and you never learned how to relax again. At the time, I didn't connect any of those things to what was happening internally. I just assumed that that was normal life. You push through, you deal with things privately, and you keep moving forward. Looking back, I can see a lot of what I was doing, holding things in that I didn't really have the space to process when they first happened. There was grief around me when I was young. There were situations I didn't have control over, and when you're a kid in those environments, you often don't have the language or the safety to unpack those experiences in real time. So they get stored somewhere. I've often wondered if that's part of why so many of my early memories feel a little out of reach now. It's not that nothing was happening, it's that my mind was busy trying to stay afloat. And when you're treading water, you're not studying the waves around you. You're just trying to keep your head above the surface. And that's what that season felt like for me. From the outside, things could look calm enough. I was doing what I was supposed to do. I wasn't causing problems, I wasn't drawing attention to myself, but underneath the surface, there was a lot of quiet effort happening just to stay steady. The challenge with treading water though is that eventually your legs get tired. No one can kick endlessly without needing rest. And if you don't find a place to stand or someone willing to help pull you ashore, eventually the exhaustion begins to show up. For a long time I didn't recognize that exhaustion for what it was. I just kept doing what I had always done, which was pushing forward and assuming that strength meant continuing no matter what. For a long time, I didn't really question that pattern of pushing through. When you've lived most of your life being the dependable one, it doesn't occur to you that there might be another way to carry things. Strength just becomes the default setting. Even when my health started giving me signals that something wasn't right, my instinct was still to keep moving forward. One of the moments that stands out the most is from that season is when my boys were little. I had two little boys at home who were six months apart in age. So life around our house was already full and busy in all the ways you ex would expect when you have two little ones running around in opposite directions 90% of the time. They were at an age where bedtime meant walking them upstairs, reading stories, getting them settled into their rooms. It was just part of the evening routine. But I remember realizing at one point something was very wrong because I could barely make it up the stairs. Every time I tried to climb to the second floor, I would start losing blood flow to the lower half of my body. My legs would go weak, and I had to stop and steady myself before I could keep going. When you have two little boys waiting upstairs for you to tuck them in bed, that moment is pretty eye-opening. It becomes very clear that your body is not functioning the way it should. You would think that something like that would immediately make you stop and reevaluate everything, but the truth is that I still kept pushing through as best I could. I was determined that my kids would feel safe and stable. And in my mind, that meant making sure their lives continued as normally as possible. Even now, when we talk about that season, they barely remember how sick I was. One of the clearest examples of how hard I was pushing came right before my brain surgery. My oldest son's birthday is in April, and when my boys were little, I used to go all out for their birthday parties. Until they were about 10 years old, which is when COVID happened, I would plan elaborate themed birthday parties with decorations, themed food, and all the little details that make the child, a child feel celebrated. And I loved doing that for them. That year, I was less than a month away from brain surgery, although at the time I didn't fully grasp how serious everything had become, but my body knew. And it was sending signals for weeks. I spent that entire week leading up to the party, cleaning, cooking, decorating, and then hosting this big party for him. And from the outside, it probably looked like everything was running the way it always had. The decorations were up, the food was ready, kids were running through the house laughing, balloons were bouncing off the walls, and I was sitting there trying to wait for my body to cooperate again. Throughout the party, I kept having these episodes where I had to sit down because physically I couldn't stay on my feet. My body would simply shut down for a moment, and I would have to sit and wait until it passed before I could get back up again. The party kept going around me while I was sitting there trying to gather enough strength to keep moving to the next thing. Looking back now, it's obvious that I was running on empty, but at the time my focus wasn't on my own health. My focus was on making sure that my son had the party that he had been looking forward to. That instinct to push through didn't stop with that health of crisis either. It's something I've noticed in myself many times over the years. If I know an important event is coming up, a wedding, a birthday party, something that really matters to someone that I love, I can almost will my body to stay well long enough to get through the event. But once that moment passes, it's often when my body finally crashes. It's like everything I've been ignoring catches up all at once. Last summer I had another experience that forced me to slow down in a way I couldn't control. I ended up needing emergency intestinal surgery, and at the time it was scary and overwhelming. And like most unexpected medical situations, it just disrupted everything in our normal routine. But what I didn't realize at that moment was that the timing of that surgery was also giving me a gift I didn't yet understand. Not long after that surgery, my dad's health began declining rapidly. Because I had already been forced to slow down and step away from the normal pace of life. I had the time and the space to sit beside his bed during his final days. I was able to be present with him in a way that would have been much harder if life had continued at its usual speed. It's one of those moments where you only recognize the gift in hindsight. At the time it just felt like another disruption, another situation that needed to be managed, but looking back now, I can see that sometimes the very things that force us to slow down are the things that allow us to be present for the moments that matter the most. And that realization began shifting something in me. Because if strength only means pushing through everything, we can miss the moments that require us to be still. One of the hardest things for people who have spent most of their lives being the strong one is learning how to let other people help carry things. I'll be honest with you, it's still something that I struggle with. Not because there aren't people in my life who are willing to help. In fact, I have some incredibly generous people around me who offer help all the time. The challenge is that when you've spent years learning how to manage things on your own, you don't always know what to ask for. Sometimes it's easier just to keep doing everything for yourself than it is to pause long enough and figure out how someone else could step in. There's also a part of me that still doesn't want to inconvenience anyone. By the time you reach adulthood, everyone you know has their own lives, their own responsibilities, their own things that they're carrying, and I never want to feel like I'm asking someone to rearrange their world just to accommodate mine. So for a long time I handled exhaustion in the same way I handled everything else. I would just keep going until my body finally forced me to stop. Usually that looked like taking a quick nap when I absolutely had no other choice, and then getting back up and continuing whatever needed to be done. It was just another quiet reset before moving forward again. But over the past few years, I've been slowly learning something different. Often through small moments that don't seem like they should matter as much as they do. One of those moments happened when I had my first cataract surgery last December. My husband was out of town for work at the time, which meant the boys and I were managing things on our own while I was recovering. After surgery, I wasn't allowed to bend over from the waist, which meant that even something as simple as loading or unloading the dishwasher suddenly became something off limits. One of my sons stepped in to help with the dishes that night, and he loaded the dishwasher for me while I sat nearby, and I remember watching him do it and realizing he wasn't doing it the way I would have done it. The dishes weren't arranged in the neat strategic way that I load them. And if you're someone who has a system for things like that, you know exactly what I mean. My instinct was to get up and fix it. But I couldn't. I wasn't allowed to bend down to the lower rack, and I wasn't supposed to be doing any kind of movement anyway. So I had to sit there and watch my son help in the way that he knew how. And in that moment, I realized something that probably should have been obvious all along. The dishes were still going to get clean. They didn't have to be done exactly in the way that I normally would do them for the outcome to be good. What mattered was that someone else had stepped in to carry that small piece of the load. It seemed like such a simple moment, but for someone who spent most of their life managing everything personally, it's actually a pretty meaningful lesson. In our tur church, we talk about the story from the Old Testament where Moses is standing with his arms raised while battle is happening below. As long as his arms stay lifted, the people of Israel are winning. But eventually Moses gets tired. And when he can't hold his arms up anymore, two other men come alongside him and help support his arms so that they stay raised. That image has stuck with me for a while. Even Moses, someone God used to lead an entire nation, wasn't meant to carry everything alone. He needed people beside him who were willing to step in and help hold the weight when his own strength started to fail. The older I get, the more I realize that strength was never meant to mean doing everything yourself. Real strength looks like allowing people who love you to come close enough to help hold your arms up when you're too tired to keep lifting them on your own. Over the past few years, I've started realizing that strength doesn't have to mean carrying everything by yourself. In fact, the older I get, the more convinced I become that real strength often looks like something very different than what most of us were taught growing up. For a long time, I believed that being dependable meant handling things quietly and making sure no one else had to adjust their life because of my needs. That mindset followed me well into adulthood. Even when people offered to help, my instinct was usually to say everything was fine and just keep moving forward. But life has a way of slowly teaching you the lessons you might not have been ready to hear earlier. One of the biggest ways that lesson has shown up for me has been putting has been through the people God has placed in my life in recent years. Our church family has become a place where people walk through their life together in a very real way. When things are hard, we cry together. When life gives you reasons to celebrate, we laugh together. There isn't this expectation that everyone has to appear polished or perfect before they show up. And for someone who's spent many years trying not to inconvenience anyone, that kind of environment environment can feel both unfamiliar and incredibly healing at the same time. Over the past year especially, I've seen what looks like what it looks like when people truly step in to support one another. When my health issues required me to slow down, people showed up in ways that reminded me I wasn't meant to carry everything alone. And when my dad's health began to decline and we knew that we were approaching the end of his life, that same community surrounded our family with a level of care that is honestly difficult to put into words. They prayed with us, they checked in on us, they made space for grief without trying to rush us through it. And for most of my life I had believed that being strong meant protecting other people from the weight of what I was carrying. But what I've slowly learned is that the right people don't see your struggles as an inconvenience, they see them as an opportunity to love you well. That shift has changed the way I think about strength. Strength isn't pouring from an empty cup while hoping no one notices how tired you are. Strength is learning to care for yourself in ways that allow you to keep showing up for the people you love over the long run. It's holding others up when they need it, while also allowing them to hold you when your own arms get too tired. It's choosing community instead of isolation. And maybe most importantly, it's trusting God enough to believe that the story doesn't fall apart if you stop trying to hold every piece of it together by yourself. When I look back over all of these years now, I can see how naturally the strong one role formed in my life. It wasn't something I consciously chose. It was something that slowly grew out of environments I was navigating and the ways I learned to adapt in them. For a long time, I thought strength meant being the person who could handle everything without needing much from anyone else. I thought being dependable meant carrying things quietly and making sure no one else had to adjust their lives because of what I was going through. But life has slowly been teaching me something different. Strength was never meant to mean doing everything alone. Real strength often looks much quieter than that. Sometimes it looks like telling the truth about how tired you are. Sometimes it looks like letting someone else carry a small part of the weight you've been holding for years. And sometimes it simply looks like trusting that the world won't fall apart if you stop trying to hold every piece together by yourself. If you spent most of your life being the strong one, you probably know how exhausting that role can become. You may have gotten very good at keeping things steady on the surface while your heart and body are working overtime underneath just to stay afloat. If that's where you are right now, I want you to hear something today. You were never meant to carry everything by yourself. God designed us for community. He placed people in our lives so that when one of us grows tired, someone else can step in and hold the weight for a while. That doesn't make you weak. It simply makes you human. And maybe learning to receive that kind of support is one of the most courageous forms of strength we can develop. For me, that season is and lesson is still unfolding. I'm still learning how to let people come alongside me in ways that once felt uncomfortable. I'm still learning that the rest isn't failure and that needing help doesn't make you less dependable. But what I can tell you is that life becomes a lot more sustainable when strength is shared instead of carried alone. And if you've been treading water for a long time, maybe today is simply an invitation to stop kicking quite so hard for a moment. There may already be people standing nearby ready to help pull you to the shore. And if the places that you've been in haven't always made space for that kind of honesty, I want you to know that healthier communities do exist. There are people out there who understand that life is messy, that healing takes time, and that none of us were meant to walk through it alone. I've been incredibly blessed to find a kind of community in my own life, especially through our church family. Over the past year, they have walked beside us through some very hard moments. And while and they've shown me some very real ways what it looks like to hold each other up when someone grows tired. And if you happen to live anywhere near Cyprus or Katy, Texas, I would genuinely love to welcome you into that community as well. Our church is a place where people come exactly as they are and where we learn to walk through our lives together. If you've ever, if you would like more information, feel free to reach out and I'd be happy to get you connected. For so many years, I believed that being strong meant continuing no matter what. And I'm learning now that strength isn't measured by how long we can carry everything alone. Sometimes strength is simply the courage to let someone walk beside you for a while. Because strength was never meant to be carried alone. If this conversation resonated with you, you might also want to sit with a couple of earlier episodes that explore similar parts of this journey. Episode 12, letting God hold what you can't, looks like looks at what it means to release the weight you've been carrying for a long time and trust God with the pieces that were never ours to hold alone. And episode 14, When Your Body Speaks, talks about learning to listen to the signals our bodies give us when something deeper needs our attention. Each of these episodes holds a different piece of this conversation, and they might be helpful companions if today's episode stirred something in your own story. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. It truly means a lot that you chose to sit with these conversations and reflect on your own journey alongside mine. If this episode encouraged you, one of the best ways you can support the podcast is simply by sharing it with someone who might need to hear it. A lot of people carry the quiet weight of being the strong one. And sometimes hearing someone else name the experience can be the first step towards realizing they don't have to carry it alone anymore. If you're new here, I would love to invite you to follow the podcast in your favorite listening app so new episodes show up automatically each week. You can also find the show now on YouTube, if that's where you prefer to listen. New long-form episodes release on Mondays, and shorter devotionals reflections come out on Thursdays. And if you enjoy having something gentle to reflect on throughout the week, there is a free devotional called Quiet Authority that you can download using the link in the show notes. It's designed to help you continue practicing these ideas in small, quiet ways as you walk through your own healing journey. Until next time, take care of yourself. Healing doesn't happen all at once. It unfolds slowly, often in the quiet moments when we begin to learn how to carry life differently. And sometimes that new way of carrying life includes letting someone walk beside us.