When Pushing Through Becomes the Problem
What happens when your body stops cooperating with the stories you’ve told yourself about strength.
For years, I thought having a high tolerance for pain was a badge of honor.
It meant I was strong. Tough. Resilient. Capable of pushing through anything life threw at me. I’d power through migraines, stomach issues, back and neck pain, weird cramps, numb limbs, anxiety, and waves of exhaustion like they were just minor inconveniences. I wore my endurance like armor. And maybe, for a while, it helped me survive.
But somewhere along the line, it stopped being strength.
It became silence.
I ignored pain because I didn’t know how to listen to it. I wrote it off as side effects. Bad posture. Hormones. Not enough sleep. Too much stress. I told myself I was just tired, just sensitive, just busy. I kept stacking reasons until I couldn’t see the signals anymore.
I watched my mother carry her pain in near silence.
Three back surgeries, strokes, depression, and we rarely heard her complain. She was a mother first. A wife. A woman who believed that pushing through was what love looked like.
So I learned early: if it hurts, you still show up.
That was the blueprint. And it baked into everything. I came to equate pushing through with responsibility. With being dependable. With doing what needed to be done regardless of what was happening inside me. Functioning became its own kind of performance—numbing out, overachieving, operating on fumes, and pretending I wasn’t.
I told myself my mind was stronger than my body.
Like that was noble.
Like it wasn’t slowly eroding me.
I had no idea what that mantra was really costing me until now.
Because something has shifted.
I was talking to my therapist last week, going over all these strange symptoms I’ve been dealing with; some for months, some for years. And somewhere in that conversation, I heard myself say, “I think I’ve been normalizing something abnormal.”
It landed with a thud in my chest.
And here’s the thing: even though I live with health anxiety, I wasn’t panicking. I didn’t spiral into worst-case scenarios. I didn’t WebMD myself into a breakdown.
Because I’ve learned something about myself over time:
When it’s panic, I fall apart.
But when it’s real, I get calm.
It’s like my body knows. My soul knows. When something is truly wrong, I don’t freak out. I slow down. I get quiet. I start collecting data. I ask better questions. I shift into problem-solving mode.
And that’s what I’ve been doing these past few weeks, without fully realizing it. Quietly tracking symptoms. Noticing patterns. Writing things down, sometimes without wanting to admit what I was doing.
I think some part of me already knew. I just wasn’t ready to look directly at it until that moment in therapy.
If you're resonating with this journey of unlearning, reckoning, and listening to the body, this is the kind of story I share weekly here.
Since that conversation, I’ve been sitting with things I don’t usually make time to sit with.
Not just the physical pain, but the stories wrapped around it. The ones that tell me I’m only valuable when I’m useful. The ones that whisper that if I just try a little harder, I’ll outrun the discomfort. The ones that say needing help is some kind of personal failure.
I didn’t invent those stories, but I sure did absorb them.
They’re laced through everything.
Every achievement.
Every time I said “I’m fine” when I wasn’t.
Every moment I kept showing up even when my body begged me not to.
Unraveling them feels like standing in a room I’ve lived in my whole life and realizing the wallpaper is made of lies.
And underneath that? There’s grief.
Grief for all the times I didn’t listen.
For all the days I told my body to wait.
For the years I believed that my worth was in my output.
That strength meant staying quiet about the pain.
But the truth is, none of that kept me safe.
It just kept me small. And sick. And unseen.
I’m realizing now that some of what I’ve called “strength” was actually just fear in disguise. Fear of being seen as fragile. Fear of not being believed. Fear of being reduced to my body, and blamed for it.
Especially as a woman.
Especially in a fat body.
Because let’s be real: fat bodies don’t get the benefit of the doubt. We get lectures. We get blamed for things before the first question is asked. And so we learn to stop asking questions ourselves. We gaslight our own pain before anyone else can.
That’s part of what I’m unlearning now:
That my body is not a problem to solve.
That rest is not weakness.
That pain is not a test of character.
And maybe most important, that I don’t have to earn the right to be cared for.
That part? Still feels like a work in progress. I’m used to being the one who holds it all. The one people count on. The one who keeps everything moving, even when her own body is screaming. I don’t know who I am when I stop doing and just… be.
When I stop managing the pain and start feeling it.
But maybe that’s the invitation here.
To find out.
To stop identifying so strongly with the version of me who could always do everything on her own.
To start honoring the version of me who is allowed to be tired.
Allowed to ask for help.
Allowed to say, “this hurts,” without apology.
This is not the end of the story.
But it is the part where I stop hiding the truth of my body.
Where I stop apologizing for having limits.
Where I finally stop calling it strength when what I really mean is survival.
Maybe you’ve lived this too.
Maybe your body has been speaking for years, and no one listened.
Maybe you’ve learned to function through pain, to survive what should have been tended.
To anyone else unraveling the myth that you have to be strong all the time…
I see you.
You don’t have to prove your pain.
You don’t have to carry it alone.
Love today,
Heather 🌸
A Question for You
Have you ever mistaken your pain for weakness, only to realize it was your body asking for care?
Where have you been pushing through when you could be listening instead?
I’d love to hear in the comments. And if this post speaks to someone you love, send it their way.