11/29/2025
When someone tells a person who is grieving, “You are strong,” it can feel… empty. Even harmful.
The griever already knows they are enduring. Every day, every hour, they are navigating a reality that has no manual, no timeline, no shortcuts. They do not need their strength celebrated. They need their grief witnessed. They need to be allowed to feel the weight, the absence, the ache, without pressure to perform resilience.
Grief is not a challenge to overcome, a problem to solve, nor a task for which you can check off “strength” or “resilience.” It is the slow, often invisible work of the heart, mind, and body. It is the work that reshapes us, sometimes cracks us open, sometimes exposes depths of tenderness and love we never knew we carried. And yes, if you believe in it, it can touch the soul itself.
To rush to call a grieving person strong, or to urge them to “move on,” is to bypass the real work, the human work. The work of being fully present with the rawness, the disorientation, the tears, the memories, the silence. This is where transformation happens, quietly, profoundly, in ways that may never be visible to anyone else. It is where courage shows up, not in the world’s idea of strength, but in the willingness to feel, to sit, and to allow grief to move through.
True strength is already present in the endurance you did not ask for. But the heart of grief, the work that reshapes and ultimately heals, is not about performing resilience. It is about the messy, beautiful, human act of allowing ourselves to feel, to bear, and to be held in what is broken and what remains.
💛 Share this with someone who needs to hear: it’s okay not to be “strong.”
💛 Witnessing the heart of grief with you,
Yasemin Isler
