Embodied grace

 

"There is a kind of woman you do not forget once you have truly seen her. She does not sparkle because life has been kind to her; she glows because life has tried to crush her and failed. Her strength is not a performance and it is not pretty in the polished way people like to praise. It is the steady, hard-won strength of someone who has sat in her own wreckage and still chosen to rebuild.

She has known fear that makes your stomach turn, grief that empties your body, and disappointment that rewrites what you thought love meant. She has been let down in ways that changed her, not just for a day, but for years. She has carried responsibilities that did not belong to her, and she has smiled in rooms where she felt like she was silently falling apart. And yet, there came a moment when something in her decided that surviving would not be her only achievement.

She did not rise because she suddenly felt brave. She rose because she was tired of bleeding quietly while pretending it did not hurt. She rose because she realised that nobody was coming to rescue the parts of her that were still begging to be seen. She rose because, at some point, even despair gets boring, and you either surrender to it or you start fighting for your own life.
The truth is, her turning point did not look heroic at first. It looked like getting out of bed with swollen eyes. It looked like answering one message instead of ignoring the world. It looked like drinking water, taking a shower, showing up to work, paying the bill, and doing the next small task when she had no energy left for big dreams. That is what people do not understand about resilience: it often begins as the smallest choice to continue.

She has scars, and she does not romanticise them. She does not call them blessings, and she does not pretend they did not cost her something. They cost her innocence. They cost her time. They cost her versions of herself that she will never get back. But they also taught her the difference between attention and care, between words and actions, between somebody wanting her and somebody valuing her.

What makes her rare is that she did not use her pain as an excuse to become cruel. She had every reason to shut her heart completely, to mistrust everyone, to stay cold so nothing could reach her again. Instead, she learned boundaries. She learned discernment. She learned how to say no without shaking, how to leave what hurts her without begging it to change, how to stop explaining herself to people committed to misunderstanding her.

She also learned how pain can make you dangerous to yourself if you do not face it honestly. She saw how easy it is to turn hurt into control, sadness into withdrawal, fear into rage. She noticed her own patterns, even the ones that embarrassed her. She took responsibility for the ways she coped when she had no support, and then she chose better once she knew better. That is not weakness; that is integrity.

She became the kind of woman who can sit with someone else’s struggle without trying to fix it just to feel in control. She listens in a way that makes people feel safe, because she remembers what it was like to speak and not be believed. She offers what she once needed: patience, steadiness, and a voice that says, I see you, and you are not crazy for feeling this. She does not save people, but she reminds them that they can survive themselves.
And she does not care how deep you sank before you found your way back. She knows that rock bottom is not a single place, and that people can be standing upright while quietly breaking inside. She knows relapse is real, grief has anniversaries, and healing is not a straight line. What she honours is the decision to rise again, especially when nobody is clapping, especially when it would be easier to disappear.

So here is the truth about her fire: it is not built from perfection, it is built from persistence. It is built from tears that did not end her, from losses that did not swallow her, from heartbreak that did not make her stop loving herself. She is living proof that a woman can be shattered and still become someone steady, someone soft, someone fierce in the most human way. And if you are becoming her, keep going, because one day your presence will be the proof someone else needs that it is possible to come back to life."

-Steve De'lano Garcia