Growing Stronger — Through Our History, Not in Spite of It

Let me begin, as I always promise you I will, with something I once believed and have had to unlearn. 

For most of my life, I thought strength meant getting past things. You took the hard chapters — the losses, the wounds, the parts of your story you'd rather not carry — and you left them behind you on the road. You grew strong the way you might grow strong after an illness: in spite of it, once it was safely in the past. Overcome it. Move on. Don't look back. I suspect many of you were taught the very same thing, and taught it well, because our generation of women became experts at it. We put our heads down and we soldiered on.

But this season of my life has been teaching me something quite different.

I have lost so much this year, and grief has a way of turning you back toward everything you thought you'd left behind. And what I've found there, waiting, is not weakness. It's my strength — all of it, every last piece of it — with its roots sunk deep into the very history I spent decades trying to grow away from. The child who was left behind is the reason I notice the ones on the edges of the room. The years of feeling I was the least loved taught me how to make other people feel seen. The heritage I was almost too wounded to recognise — the coral, the lineage, my mother's dignity — turns out to be the ground I'm now standing on as I step into being the matriarch of my family. None of that came in spite of my history. All of it came through it.

That is the quiet correction I want to offer you this Sunday. We are not strong despite where we've come from. We are strong because of it — because of what we survived, what we carried, what we learned in rooms nobody else saw. A tree does not grow tall by pretending it has no roots, or by wishing its roots were somewhere prettier. It grows tall precisely because those roots go down into the real ground, hard soil and all, and draw up everything that soil has to give. 

Your history is not the thing you overcame on the way to becoming strong. It is the source. The difficult years were not wasted, and they were not detours away from the woman you were meant to be. They were her making.

We do not grow stronger in spite of our history. We grow stronger through it — roots down in the real ground, drawing up everything it has to give.

So let me leave you with this, gently: what is one chapter of your story you've been treating as something to grow past — and what might change if you let yourself grow from it instead? 

With love,

Faith & the Silver Sirens

Routines and Rituals That Held me this Week

This week, in the middle of it all, I made bone broth. For me — not for anyone else to be fed. I laid the bones in a heavy pot, covered them, and let them tremble on the lowest heat for hours while the house filled with a smell my mother and her mother would have known by heart. There is something steadying in a ritual that asks only for patience and gives back nourishment. It reminded me that the woman who holds the pot for everyone else is allowed, sometimes, to be the one who is fed.