What Strong Means to Me Now

Years ago, I published a book called Come Back Strong.

Recently, I pulled it off the shelf and started flipping through it. I found an earlier version of myself. And apparently, she had a few things to say to me.

At one point in the book, I wrote:

“I had jumped back into my life at full speed and intensity. It was too much too soon. In the past, pushing harder was all I knew. Now, I couldn’t. Something had to give.”

I read that and laughed.

Some lessons take a few trips around the block before they stick.

The Strong I Used to Know

For a long time, I measured strength by what I could do.

I was the woman who got up at 5 a.m. to run before work. I ran a marathon. I became a competitive cyclist and discovered I was pretty damn good at riding a bike. I could do more than 15 pull-ups. At 43, I was in the best physical shape of my life.

Strong. Capable. Driven. Disciplined.

Those weren't bad things. I still like those things about myself. But somewhere along the way, I also learned to associate strength with pushing, producing, striving, accomplishing. Doing more than being.

If something was hard, push harder.

If I was tired, keep going.

If my plate was full, figure out how to carry it.

If there was more I could do, do more.

If life knocked me down, get back up and get moving.

So when surgery knocked me flat, I approached recovery pretty much the same way I approached everything else. Get back to work. Get back on the bike. Get back to the gym. Get back to normal. Come back strong.

Except my body wasn't interested in my timeline.

And, as it turned out, neither was the rest of me.

Coming Back Isn't Going Back

There's another passage in the introduction that struck me differently this time.

I wrote about how that season led me to rediscover passions from childhood. I questioned who I was and who I wanted to be. I put my relationships, career, hobbies, and interests under a microscope.

Reading it now, I realize something I didn't fully understand when I wrote the book. I wasn't trying to get my old life back. I was figuring out what I wanted the next one to look like.

There's a difference.

Coming back strong doesn't mean going back to who you were before.

Maybe that's why those words are landing so differently for me now. I'm in another season of examining what fits and what doesn't. What deserves my energy. What I want more of. What I'm ready to put down. The circumstances are completely different. The questions aren't.

Who am I now?

What matters to me?

What do I want my days to feel like?

What am I carrying because it matters, and what am I carrying simply because I've always been capable of carrying it?

That last one will get you.

Strong Enough to Choose

The funny thing is, the woman who wrote Come Back Strong already knew some of this.

Back then, I was learning to rest. To take naps. To ride my bike for joy instead of always making it a workout. To spend time in nature. To remember how to play.

I even wrote:

“I also had to learn to get off my own back.”

Well.

Hello again, Lori. 😂

But I don't think I'm being asked to learn the same lesson today. I'm not learning how to rest. I'm learning how to choose.

Maybe that's what growth does. We circle back to familiar questions, but we meet them as different people. The lesson changes because we have.

For much of my life, strength was about what I could do. How hard could I work? How much could I accomplish? How much could I carry? How far could I push myself? These days, I'm much more interested in another question: How do I want to live?

That's a different measure of strength. It requires discernment. Knowing what deserves my time and energy and what doesn't. It requires authenticity. Choosing what actually fits me instead of what I think I should want, should do, or should be. And increasingly, it requires joy.

Not joy as a reward I earn after I've finished everything else. Joy as information. As something worth paying attention to when I'm deciding what belongs in my life.

I still believe in hard work. I still love challenging myself. I still want to ride up the damn hill on my bike. But I don't want to build a life around proving what I can do. I want to build one around knowing who I am.

And maybe one of the best examples of that is sitting on my desk right now. I'm preparing to publish Cycling Shorts, a book I don't think I could have written when I wrote Come Back Strong. Not because I wasn't capable of writing it. Because I hadn't lived it yet.

There were still rides to take. People to meet. Things to lose and rediscover. Lessons about trust, belonging, joy, community, and finding my way back to myself that I hadn't learned yet.

Come Back Strong captured one version of me trying to find her way forward.

Cycling Shorts comes from the woman who kept going.

Maybe that's what coming back strong means to me now. Not going back to the person I was. Not returning to the pace I once kept. Not filling my life simply because I have the capacity to fill it. But choosing what feels true. Making room for what brings me alive. Letting go of some of the shoulds.

And trusting myself enough to know the difference.