Young people say: I don't believe women and girls should have to be stronger. We ought to be fighting for a world that gives us all less to survive. I
Young people say: I don’t believe women and girls should have to be stronger. We ought to be fighting for a world that gives us all less to survive. I’m tired of hearing the word “strong” used in relation to women and girls-especially Black women and girls.
I hear the heart in that statement — and I sincerely honor it. 
It’s beautiful, necessary, and righteous to say:
We shouldn’t have to keep getting stronger.
The world should stop putting so much on our backs.
And I agree — deeply. No pushback.
As a Gen-X womanist, I live with a double awareness:
✨ what should be
and
🔥 what actually is.
(Trigger warning…skip this paragraph if today is not a good day for you.)
Here’s how I would speak to it.
We deserve relief — and yet, here we are
Like untold numbers of female human beings before me, who were:
mutilated, tortured, set on fire, burned by acid, forcefully impregnated,
forcefully sterilized, disappeared, disfigured, raped, raped by gangs for hours,
strangled to death during a sex act, feticided, trafficked and exploited,
girls forced to marry men old enough to be your grandfather,
girls forced into unsafe isolation because she naturally menstruated,
girls forced away from education,
unheard and therefore died with their babies in childbirth,
women imprisoned in a small cell with a male,
women and children imprisoned in a home with a violent male,
women and children violently used in a war their voices never had the power to start or stop
...all deserved softness or at the very least ….people to give a damn. People to make changes. These are experiences that are unique to female human beings that have been repeated since the beginning of time and yet through every new innovation there has not even been INTEREST in finding solutions to even one of these issues. Stand in line for every new shoe or tech creation but not for the safety of women and children.
Will our generation too go to our deaths waiting for male human beings to stand up to one another? To make these changes without demanding more, and more, and still more labor from us with no equitable or safe light at end of the tunnel anyway?
I look at younger voices and I feel hope.
They are naming something many of us didn’t have the language for:
Survival shouldn’t be a personality trait.
Resilience shouldn’t be demanded like rent.
Women shouldn’t have to be the nation’s shock absorbers.
But to declare that you have survived is a powerful declaration to yourself
your soul, and to other people trying to crawl through second by second.
I think people who the language is not for don’t understand and I’m okay with that.
But for many it is like the fireflies or we used to call them lighting bugs as a kid.
When one firefly lights up,
another finds its way.
Survivors naming themselves
are simply saying,
“I’m here — there is a path through the dark.”
I will never stop telling the story of the first story of surviving child sexual abuse that I heard.
I was sitting in the audience when Miss America 1950 Marilyn Van Debur Atler told her story.
I needed it. Desperately. It was life-supplying. At that time I was in my late teens and all of my masks were failing. I had been talking about the child sexual abuse I experienced with a counselor since I was 13, but it gets to a point. I could not deal with the pain. I was at my personal edge.
We do not all make it.
Living with this kind of pain that few understand, having to shift it to get up another hill and yes, be strong enough to confront the impact that it had on your life and what it has done to your family; perhaps going back generations-requires remarkable resilience and perseverance. This is a marathon. And like every marathon runner, we need other people.
Hearing her story. On that day. Was a light in darkness that I needed and many of the stories that I heard thereafter were like that.
And still, too— the systems haven’t changed fast enough.
The world has not softened…. yet.
Bills still come.
Violence still happens.
Grief still finds our doors.
Institutions still fail us.
So while I honor the call for a gentler world, I also know:
📌 The storms are still here, whether we consent or not.
Strength isn’t about “toughen up”
When I talk about strength, I’m not talking about:
❌ swallowing pain
❌ pretending nothing hurts
❌ carrying other people’s burdens without question
I’m talking about something quieter. Wiser. Earned through living.
- strength that sets boundaries
- strength that walks away
- strength that refuses to be guilted
- strength that saves our own life first
- strength that doesn’t argue with people determined to misunderstand us
Strength that says:
I am not your mule.
I am not your endless resource.
I am not sacrificing myself to prove loyalty.
Our strength today must look different than the strength our mothers were forced to use.
Theirs was survival at any cost.
Ours can be survival with self-preservation intact.
We hold two realities at once
Yes — we deserve a world that asks less of us.
And yes — until that world exists:
- we build skills that protect our peace
- we stay alert and spiritually grounded
- we cultivate communities that don’t drain us
- we practice saying no without apology
- we keep learning how predators, systems, and manipulation work
Not because we “should have to.”
But because right now, it keeps us alive.
My prayer for us
May the next generation inherit a softer world.
May they not need the armor we carried.
But until that day:
➡️ we stay wise
➡️ we stay discerning
➡️ we stay whole
➡️ we stay here — in our bodies, in our truth, in our worth
Not because the world demands strength…
But because we deserve to be protected — including by ourselves.
There is truth in the longing for a world that asks less of us.
A world that doesn’t make Black women — and those pushed to the edges —
carry the weight of everyone else’s lesson plans.
I honor that truth.
I also carry another one.
I have lived long enough to see how often that sentence is spoken
in the same breath that asks us — again —
to show up for people who do not show up for us.
To welcome.
To embrace.
To march.
To comfort.
To explain.
To translate harm into something palatable.
To keep extending grace
into hands that have never once learned to hold us carefully.
And I recognize it — not with bitterness,
but with a knowing that sits deep in the bones.
Because we did that, too.
We believed that if we poured enough love into the world,
it would eventually learn how to love us back.
We believed that loyalty meant silence,
and sacrifice meant safety.
We mistook endurance for holiness.
Now, from this season of life, I understand something quieter:
Strength is not about becoming harder. (Perhaps others have no idea of what each individual’s definition of that is)
It is about becoming clearer.
Clear enough to say:
I still believe in justice —
but not at the expense of my own soul.
I still believe in community —
but not if I have to disappear inside it.
I still believe in love —
but it will no longer be the kind that leaves me empty.
We can hold the dream of a softer world
and still train our hands
to build shelter for ourselves right now.
We can honor the young voices calling for relief
while gently whispering back:
yes — may the world grow kinder
but until it does
let us keep our hearts awake
our boundaries steady
and our devotion rooted in places
that also know how to love us.
Not in accusation.
Not in scolding.
Just truth — spoken with care —
And even as we speak of strength,
may it never again be the kind that costs us our own lives.
May it be the strength that lets us finally come home to ourselves.