I’ve never understood why “you’re such a strong woman” is meant to feel like a compliment.
It doesn’t land that way—not anymore.
Not when strength is just another word for what we've had to become.
Not when it means: You’ve suffered and kept going. You’ve been hurt and didn’t fall apart. You’ve swallowed fear and still showed up.
They call it strength.
But I call it survival.
And I need to say this — really say it:
I don’t want to be a strong woman.
I have to be one.
I have to be, just to wake up in this world.
To walk down a street.
To sit alone in a café.
To get home after dark with my keys between my fingers and my heart in my throat.
To say no. To say maybe. To say nothing and still be blamed.
There is a knowing that lives in us — the kind we don’t speak out loud unless we trust someone deeply.
The knowing that most women, most female-bodied people, have been violated.
Touched without consent.
Watched. Followed. Dismissed. Disbelieved.
We are told to protect ourselves.
Don’t walk here.
Don’t wear that.
Don’t stay out.
Don’t go alone.
Don’t drink too much.
Don’t trust.
Don’t live.
And if something happens, we’re told to be strong.
To be calm.
To forgive.
To move on.
Even now, as I write this — in my own garden, in my own skin — I feel it: that slow, creeping fear.
I’m sitting in my underwear.
Surrounded by houses.
And some part of me whispers: Is someone watching? Filming? Staring?
My body tenses, ready.
That old, familiar dread flickers in my chest.
We are never alone, not really — not when the male gaze can pass through glass.
And this is the part they never see:
How it lives in our bodies.
In our jaw, clenched tight.
In our shoulders, hunched from decades of flinching.
In our wombs and hips and backs — storing everything we’ve ever braced ourselves against.
We are tired.
Not just sleepy, not just burnt out.
Tired like bone-tired.
Tired like ancestral tired.
Tired like we are carrying centuries of warning signs and whispered survival tactics inside us.
Tired of scanning every room.
Tired of avoiding eye contact but also not ignoring it.
Tired of being told to relax, while constantly calculating exit routes.
Tired of pretending.
Tired of the tight smiles.
Tired of saying “it’s fine” when we want to scream.
Tired of being told we’re strong when what we actually feel is alone.
So no — it’s not a compliment when you say “you’re such a strong woman.”
It’s not empowering.
It’s not comforting.
It’s just true.
And it shouldn’t have to be.
We are strong because we had no choice.
We are strong because being anything else meant danger.
Because strength was stitched into us like armour from the moment we learned what it meant to be a girl.
But we are tired of armour.
Tired of battle.
Tired of being so damn resilient.
We don't want to be strong.
We want to be soft.
We want to be safe.
We want to be still.
We want to rest.
We want to exist without hypervigilance.
We want to be — without fear, without performance, without threat.
So don’t call me strong.
Call me woman.
Because to be woman in this world — truly — is already more strength than anyone should ever have to carry.
And we are tired.
And we are rising.
Softly. Fiercely. Finally.
We don’t want to be strong.
We just want to be.
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