The Death of Being “The Strong One”

In this episode, I’m sharing something I’ve been holding back for a while. It's a vulnerable one.

This is a personal one—about my fertility journey, but more than that, about the identity I didn’t realize I was holding onto: being “the strong one.”

I talk about what it’s looked like to carry that identity, why it’s no longer working for me, and what I’m learning about letting it go.

We also get into:
 – how grief and joy can exist at the same time
 – why you don’t have to have it all together to move forward
 – and what it really means to let yourself be supported

If you’ve ever felt like you have to hold everything together… this one’s for you.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it or leave a review—it helps more people find the podcast 🤍

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@marycatemcdonald

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Transcript

0:00

Hi, and welcome to It's Not That Serious, Even When It Is. I am your host, Mary McDonald. I am a coach and use human design as a tool to see my clients deeply and guide them to a more joy-led and embodied life. On this podcast, we will have deep conversations and some giggles because life can't be so serious all the time. Hello, welcome to my podcast. I want to talk about the death of an identity. Fun. Yes. So this is something that has been going on for, I don't know, about three years now. And I've actually really been struggling deciding if I wanna share this, um, how much I wanna share. And it's for a couple of reasons. One, it's because like you struggle with some of this personal stuff, right? Like, how much do I really want the world to know about me and how much am I privately processing? And. You know, why am I sharing this now? And I will tell you a couple of things. So I'm gonna talk about a journey with fertility, just as a warning. If you are, don't wanna hear about it, then skip, skip. But I believe a lot of this applies to a lot of people. So I I've struggled with this because I am a five one manifester in human design. One of the things about being a five one in human design is that people project onto you consistently. So I have actually been afraid of sharing this because I don't wanna deal with other people's projections. I am not asking for advice on this subject. I'm not asking for tips. I'm not asking for attention. I'm not asking for support. But I am a manifester and I have three things happening for me right now. I have a defined head, a defined ajna, and a defined throat. And as a person with a defined throat and human design, I am meant to tell stories and I am meant to voice things and I'm actually pretty damn good at it. I've actually just been holding myself back by not telling this story and by not bringing it up and by not talking about it. So. About three years ago, actually, let's just like back up for, let's take a beat. So Bryce and I did not know if we wanted to have kids when we got married. We were kind of like every single year. We were like, yeah, in five years. We'll think about that. We'll think about that. And I had a doctor when I turned 30 tell me that like, I should probably freeze my eggs and I should have listened to him. But I just thought that was like, ugh. Ridiculous. And then when we started trying to get pregnant, I had someone tell me like, you should just go ahead and get all the testing done. And I wasn't ready to hear that. Um, so I did not receive it. So just a reminder here, sometimes we hear things from people and we're just not ready to receive it. So I was not ready to receive that in the moment. Like we're just not ready to hear like, oh, you might need to do some testing. We tried for a year and were unsuccessful, obviously. And in the ne at the end of that year we did some testing and we found out what the problem was. And I don't feel like sharing that portion of my story 'cause it's really not the point of all of this. Maybe I will one day, but I just, I'm gonna keep that one in my back pocket for my own privacy reasons. So we found out that there was an issue and we actually kind of just took, oh, we took several months off to process that and it was a grieving process. And I'm here say that it actually still is a grieving process. So a couple months later we found a doctor here in la. Actually, lemme back up. That first doctor was the worst. The delivery of the news was like actually pretty shitty. And then to get our genetic testing results, he wanted us to pay a hundred dollars to just get those results from him and have a 10 minute phone call. So, I'm not saying that everybody in the fertility community is shitty, but like him in particular, extra shitty. Then we went to this other doctor and he gets shitty, but we don't know that for like a full year. So we went through five rounds of IUI, very difficult and did not get pregnant. And at the end of that we found out. So I had some additional blood work done and I got the results back from that and. My doctor called to tell me, and then I asked for a physical copy of my results so that I could have them. And we found out that he read me somebody else's chart. Cool. Yes. Neat. We found out, he read, uh, somebody else's chart for my blood work results, which was neat. And then he had me on something that actually. I took my egg quality numbers down, uh, which we didn't find out until later. And then, um, there was part of this whole process that we found out later from another doctor that like could have caused our child to have severe birth defects. So we would've done all of this work to have that happen and to go through just like another insurmountable amount of grief. For something that's like. Super avoidable. If you really wanna talk about what that is, you can send me a DM and we can chat about it. But again, like I don't wanna go into the details of too much of like the process of like why we have to go through this. The point is that we're going through this and it's shitty. And so through another one of my friends, um, we found another doctor in Dallas. He is lovely, wonderful, absolutely amazing. We have been through three rounds of egg retrievals, and I'm about to go through my fourth one in a couple of months, and the first one was successful. We have one healthy embryo, which is lovely. The last two have not been successful and it has been really hard. Really hard. And through all of this, every time there's something that's been unsuccessful, it has taken me on a deep personal growth journey. And sometimes in the middle of this, when you're going on this like deep personal growth journey, you, and I'll just kind of be like, God, like I'm good on the lessons. Like if you would like to teach me a different, less hard way, I'd be down. I'd be like. Super down and he's like, look, uh, sorry, but this is the only way to get through to you. So I wanna talk about some of the lessons that I've learned along the way and where we are right now in this process. And kind of like the death of all the identities that I've lived in the past in the past three years. So. Oof. That is the beginning of this episode. That is what this is gonna be about is death of some identities. So if you haven't been through this process, you like, you grieve everything that you always thought you were gonna have, you grieve you grieve getting pregnant naturally. You grieve like the fact that it's not gonna be a surprise or like, you are not going to, it's not gonna be what it is for a lot of the population. You have this grief of like, you know, the gender. So yeah, I could go surprise me, whatever, but you know, I probably won't. So it's like, all of these things way ahead of time and yeah, of course, like there's some great things to IVF, like. Yeah, I'll say all of the things of like, yes, we're grateful to be born in this time when it's still possible to use science and all of the things to get pregnant and have a family, and, you know, grateful for that. Grateful for the support that we have from our family and our friends. We are grateful for all of it. Like all of those things still doesn't make it hard or doesn't make it hard, doesn't make it easy like. If you've been through this process, you are so happy for every single one of your friends who has kids, who is able to get pregnant easily. The ones who have called to tell you that they're pregnant in the middle of this journey, and then you are so thrilled for them because like you can't, you would never want anybody to go through the experience that you're going through. However, like it, it comes with, you hang up from that call and you immediately like. Have a moment of grief, you immediately like have those moments of like, man, I wish that was me. So there has been, grief has been a rollercoaster for us for the past three years, and I'm gonna talk about my experience with it personally and um. This is just gonna be a part of the podcast and it's gonna be a part of my journey. It is not my identity, it is just a part of my life. And I've been really careful with that because I don't follow a lot of people going on this journey online because it tends to, and, and rock on if you do. This is not a judgment call. This is just me personally. A lot of people tend to like, make this their entire personality and for me, like. I don't have the energy for this to be my entire personality. It is all consuming as it is already. And it's just a piece of the journey. Like it is kind of a shitty piece, but it's a piece. And I think one of the other things I'll just like note right now is that I have really struggled with wanting to even share this because. As a coach and somebody who helps people move through their emotions and helps people step into the next level of their lives, like, I just kind of felt like I had to have it all figured out before I came and like told any parts of my story. And also I find that a lot of people expect me to be like happy and like joyful and like funny and like the girl that wears wigs and the girls that dances surround in her kitchen. And I am all of those things. For sure. And a lot of those things have helped me move through this process. But like I am also a multi, dimensional human with a lot of shit. I'm coming here to just like add that into the mix anyway. So Death of an identity. Yeah. You have this idea of, of. How you expect pregnancy to go, how you expect, like building a family to go. You have all of these expectations and when you don't have that, like, and your reality is not that, it's really fucking difficult. So one of the things that I realized this morning as I was going on a walk is that. I have always been told like how strong I am. Like I, you're so strong and you can get through anything. And you know, I'm just like so proud of you for being so strong. And guys, guess what? That is not anything I ever asked for. And I am, I understand what people are saying and I can comprehend that and that. I know that is like fed to me as a compliment and I thank you. However, like I have held onto this identity for I think probably until today, when am I recording this? March 16th that I am the strong one and like I can just muscle through it and I can just like white knuckle my way through this difficult situation. And then once it's all over, I can just like pack it up in a box and it can be done, and so I've gone through this cycle of just wishing this process would be over so I could just be quote unquote over it. Um, I could just be through the hard part, you know, I could just be really like strong and like I made it through and like, look how strong I am. And that is like, there are about a multi multitude of issues wrong with that. I, what I have learned is that. I have been holding in a bunch of different areas in my life, but I've been holding onto this like identity of like, I get to be the strong one. I am the strong one. I will hold it together. I will hold it together for Bryce and I, I'll hold it together for everybody that is affected by my, by these fertility issues, like our families. Like I will be the strong one. I won't talk too much about it. I will hold it together. I will, I will stand on the hill of, I am very fine. And I am processing my emotions in the background, and I'll get back to you later on how it's going. And I, it's just been this, like, I'm very strong narrative and I'm not, and I don't wanna be is the reality. I actually don't wanna be the strong one. Like I, I don't wanna be her anymore. I am not here to be her. I, I can be her sometimes, but like. She doesn't get to be my full personality. And what it made me realize is that like I, we've had a really difficult year touch on this a little later, but we've had a really difficult year in general this past year with the entertainment industry being up and down. That's where what Bryce works in and it's just been. A fucking lot, and I won't dive too much into that in this episode, but what I was doing for this past year at least, was I was not communicating to Bryce that like I needed a soft space to land. And I was not telling him that, like, and I thought that like, it's okay if I keep this all to myself because then it's nobody else's issue, even though like he's going through it too. It's not, it's not a one, it's not a one woman show over here. Fertility affects both of us. It affects our marriage, it affects us as a couple. But what I was doing is I was not allowing myself any soft space to land. I was not allowing myself any bit of grace and while I was. Still processing my emotions. And I still do a lot of things initially alone because again, projection people project right onto me like how I should feel, and I just need a moment before I actually process this out loud with anybody. And anyway, I was not allowing this like safe space to land, so. What I'm working through right now is this death of the identity of being the strong one. And I think a lot of, I think a lot of women deal with this, you know, it's like this like mental load of like, you know what if I just like hold it all together, if I just like keep juggling all the balls, like, and I just like make my life as perfect as I can, then like everybody else can, like, it'll be good for everyone else. It'll be good for everyone else while like in the meantime you are just bypassing everything. Because you in the name of like being strong because that's what we were taught to do. 'cause like if you're strong then you'll be successful. If you're strong, then you'll have the life of your dreams. If you're strong and you white knuckle through everything that's difficult. Like the rainbow is on the other side, your pot of gold is on the other side and it's just like not fucking true. And I can tell you that because I have white knuckled the past three years and I still am not pregnant. And that is just the reality. Me today, I am committing to not being the strong one. And I came home from this walk and Bryce happened to be home this morning and I just looked at him and I just started crying and I just said, Hey, I need to be really honest with you. Like, I know, you know, this is really difficult for me and I know it's been difficult for you, but I actually have been holding back on how, how hard this is for me. Because I didn't wanna put any of that onto you, and I have a very good partner because he looked at me and he was like, it's okay. Like you have to do what you have to do and I'm here for you and I am your soft space to land. And I. One of the things I think I've been really afraid of was that like one hour I am fine, right? Like one hour I am just like giggles and dancing around the kitchen and then the next hour I am just like in deep grief and I was not allowing myself this space to have that. I was very much like, again, even though I was processing a lot of this alone. Fertility is a couple thing. I dunno if you know, but like, it's like it's with your partner and I just felt like I needed to be strong for us. And if I could like, do all of the emotional work on my side of the street, that like we would be okay. And if I could just like manage the energy of this whole baby coming into existence that like, you know, it'd be fine because like it's gonna be my body, it's gonna be all of. You know a lot on me. Like if I could just manage it, then like we'd be okay and I'm not gonna do that anymore. So I had this death of an identity of like being the strong one. I won't be doing that in my business clearly. 'cause like I thought that again, if I shared, if I shared this out loud, which is such a lie, if I shared this out loud, that. Nobody would hire me to help them move through their own shit. And it's just such a lie. And I thought that like if I shared the hard shit out loud that like I wouldn't continue to manifest anything good. You know, because it's like you have like law of attraction and you wanna vibe high to like pull the good things into your life. But like there's also this like law of grace and. The fact is that if you just bottle up all of your shit and you don't talk to anybody about it, and again, like there's a lot of stuff that I actually did process and I was very much okay with. I just wasn't doing it with the person who is the center of my life. Like I just wasn't allowing myself that. But if you don't process those things like. Manifesting all of your shit just gets harder. And here's like my case in point, that you don't have to have it all together for things to happen. Like I, in the same day as I'm talking to one of my mentors, one of my really good friends, I'm like, look, Deanna, like I'm feeling anxious about all this stuff, yada, yada, yada. I just need help processing this blah blah, blah thing. Yeah, and also I'm like just nervous about my business and yada, yada, yada. And I just, you know, launched this thing to a couple people and what if it doesn't work out? Literally, I am telling her all this. I open my email and I, I've just booked a client, so I say all this to say that like, you can be going through the hardship and like good things can still be happening. You can still be manifesting the dream life. You can still be manifesting the business. You can still be manifesting, you know, whatever it is that you're looking for. Being the strong one is not being of service to yourself, and it's not being of service to anybody else. So I guess this is a good segue into talking about what I do, because this kind of shit, like you don't necessarily pick up on it when it's just you. It's just you doing the processing. It's just you living through the thing You. really needs somebody to help you see your patterns and guide you through this kind of shit, like death of an identity. This episode being the strong one, didn't just come like out of my. Like it came from doing a lot of work with a couple coaches who work in energetics and work and have helped me like move through my business, move through my life in several different ways. And so I would say that this is actually probably. Wasn't where I thought I was going with this episode, but it is a good segue into what I do and the type of work I do as a coach. And it is to tell you that a lot of times people can see these patterns who have done the work already, who are in the middle of the work in whatever way, shape, or form to. Help you see your own patterns. We are the ones who are going to help point those out to you so that you can get out of this loop of like, you don't have to be the strong one all the time. You don't have to be the one that has it all the fucking together. Like nobody has it together. Like if you think everybody has it together, like they're fucking liars, man. There can be a lot of good going on in your life, but like nobody has it all together. But you need a person to. To express these things too. And you need a person who can help you through the cycle and you need a person who can help you guide yourself out of this like hole that you've dug. And the whole thing is that it's not, it's actually not that hard. There is a level of vulnerability to having a one-on-one coach where like. You do have to show up with your shit and you do have to be ready to hear the truth and you do have to be ready to talk about it however you could. Like the difference between working through this on your own and working through it with a coach, is that like. You could be working on this four months alone, just trying to affirm yourself into some different identity. Or you could have a session with a coach and they're going to help you process and move through it about a million times quicker so that you can get to the life that you deserve. You can get to the space that you want to be in. So, there's no timeline on how you're gonna get there or when you're gonna get there, but like. Okay. Me having the support that I've had has helped me come to this place and has helped me come to this like exhale of like, oh man, okay. Like today I just realized that I don't wanna be the strong one anymore. I don't want it. I'm not her. It's not like my ego doesn't need to be tied to that anymore. So, because of all the work that I've done with the coaches that I have and, yeah, literally all the work that I've done over probably the past four years since I learned my human design, uh, it's been a game changer. So anyway, that is my little story for today. That is death of an identity of death, of being the strong one and not allowing my ego to get in the way of that. So if this resonated with you, I would love it if you shared left a review on this podcast. Um. As I'm just getting started on it and uh, yeah, that's it. Have a good one. Thank you for joining me on today's episode. If something resonated with you, then we are probably best friends. And friends rate, review, and share episodes. If you wanna stay connected, you can find me on Instagram, @marykatemcdonald. That's Mary C-A-T-E McDonald. If you want more information on coaching or wanna keep connected in my weekly newsletter, you can find that in the show notes. Thanks again for joining me on today's episode. I'm looking forward to catching you in the next one. And just a reminder that it's not that serious, even when it is.