Surviving in a “hard situation” resembles suffering much more closely than it does strength.
That flower is not surviving pinned under rubble for the sake of inspiring the flowers that are not, nor for the sake of “becoming stronger” - it is surviving because until someone bothers to remove the boulders that are crushing it, its options are to survive or to die. And plenty of flowers in that same situation would die, and its actually not out of the question that this flower’s eventual death will be due to these conditions that it is forced to endure.
Knowing that, would you still compliment the flower on its strength, on the fact that it has not yet been killed, before considering that maybe, just maybe, you and the other flowers might want to find a way to do something about those boulders that would have already killed any weaker flower?
One should not prioritize complimenting the systematically abused for surviving their undue suffering above working to prevent that undue suffering from continuing. Their suffering and tragedy should not be repurposed as inspiration porn.
Strength is often not about how your survive or why you do so but just rather the fact that you did. That despite all the misery and pain that surrounds you, you’ve found a way to just get through the day. To not let it overwhelm you completely even though it’s wearing you down. Someone who thinks about not waking up the next day but does so anyway chooses to be strong. For themselves or others.
Who would you consider strong? The guy who can hit the hardest or the guy who can take that hit and stay standing?
Your choice is survive or die, and most people are almost hardwired to not even regard death as a choice, so there’s really no autonomy. I suppose you could say my mind is strong, but that’s about as meaningful as saying I have naturally strong muscles: cool, but that’s not something I did or earned, that’s birth luck.
I don’t want to be seen as strong for my struggles. I was only a bit of bad luck from death, would that person have been considered weaker than me now? She’s hardly different from me, so if she’s weak I’m weak. And if you’d say we’re both strong, what’s the point in calling a survivor strong anyway? I’ll take the title “survivor”, but " strong" implies more power than I really had.
Ok but I’m still going to tell someone who is not yet dead from cancer and trying to see through the treatment as strong. As it’s helping my relative stay inspired to allow the docs to help them give life a fighting chance even though medically assisted death is an option for them.
Extremely well said 👍
When people say i am brave or whatever, I tell them I am an example of survivor’s bias. For every one of me, there’s thousands that don’t make it. I am a fluke of fate’s whimsy, not of my own bravado and moxie.
Give yourself credit. For each of those fallen, you’ve taken a step further. Be it because of them or in spite of them you saw the day after that they didn’t. Call it a fluke or the result of entropy but if we’ll never know the answer what’s the harm in allowing yourself to be known as brave? To take that shiny little title of inspiration and make it real? Wear it like badge. Try to be brave. Try to be what you think they see rather than what you see.
You’re missing the point here. This is not about making someone feel better about themselves but about making others realize how bad it was to finally spur them into action. Because it’s so much easier to “admire” someone strong than just to do something about the adversity.
I know nothing about you, but if I just read your comment in this context I want to scream at you: You, too, think you’re making a differene by trying to make someone feel good about themselves, but what have you done about easing their suffering? It’s not like it has stopped, it will go on for the rest of our lifes.
You’re just taking the easy way out by giving a pep talk then it’s back to normal.
Now, like I said, I know nothing about you, and maybe this pep talk was from one survivor to another, but I’m just so damn tired to hear the same song and dance over and over. We don’t need pep talks that make the talkers feel good about themselves, we need change. Good change.
Life is about perspective first and foremost. To look at obstacles as adversity will make it a miserable one to surmount. You will dread it, agonize over having to endure it, become anxious at the thought of the next one. I like to listen to philosophy and one of my favorite quotes is on my profile and it’s by my favorite philosopher by far. I’ve learned a lot from a dead Roman emperor and my comments aren’t exactly pep talks as much as they are helping people change their point of view on life and its trials.
There will never, ever, be change which eradicates adversity entirely. We can work towards reducing it but it will always find a new way to appear. So instead of trying to live without obstacles, to avoid the hurdles life will always put in front of you - change how you address it. Don’t think of it as misfortune, think of it as a challenge to become stronger, to be thankful even to have the opportunity to overcome adversity. The quality of your life is a direct reflection of that quality of your thoughts and while I have yet to master these kinds of teachings, I recognize the immeasurable value in them.
I have a whole host of issues in my life, things that would cause immense stress for people, but I know I can’t change them so I do everything I can to let my feelings around them go. Not having enough money for bills, groceries running low, next paycheck not being for another 9 days, I can’t change those things. All I know is that I will have the mental weapons I have now to overcome those problems when they arise and that brings me comfort. To know I will be as ready as I need to be and I will become more experienced with those situations when they’re finished.
Be grateful for every day you wake up for not everyone does. Enjoy as much as you can and worry as little about the things that cause you misery as possible. I know these are easy words to say, I know it’s challenging to put them into practice, but I promise you it makes the suffering sting just a little bit less.
I get where you’re coming from. But if everyone thought your way, adversity will only ever grow.
You need to be upset, and you need to be working to reduce adversity for those who don’t have the resilience it takes. Adversity is like chaos, if you never do anything it will overwhelm even the strongest person.
Your perspective is not wrong (perspectives rarely are), I just think it’s unhelpful for the greater picture. It works for an individual, but it will do nothing for your peers. Instead, it serves to protect those who benefit from other people suffering and being disadvantaged, because if everyone practiced that there would not be enough anger to fuel change. And change is needed.
Anger and frustration is your energy. If you never get angry you’ll never have the incentive to change the world. Your perspective is probably helpful with chronic conditions, because there’s nothing to change about that, but in my opinion it’s wrong to apply it to every situation.
If you find yourself facing human-constructed adversity, like in a society that doesn’t want to do minimal changes that would only slightly inconvenience them but would greatly benefit some of their peers, I think your advice is harmful - because it quells the flames that are needed to fight for a better society.
They’re both right.
Sure, but it implies that survival is only a matter of strength, and any who fail to survive, do so because they weren’t strong enough. Circumstances of birth play a massive role. 100 equally adept children will fare very differently in Gaza and London.
That would be an accurate implication. They’re not weak because they died but they’re certainly strong to endure such brutal experiences. The dead are not always weak and the living are not always strong but to endure strife and survive begits a stronger person than one who lives an effortless life and dies peacefully. That left flower surviving wouldn’t indicate strength, it has no obstacles to keep it from living. The right one has to overcome much more to achieve the same thing… making it strong.
Not autistic, but as a person with a chronic medical condition, damn this hits hard.
adds being queer to the pile of reasons this comic might hit hard
I do feel this comic but surviving still takes strength.
Exactly. I have a friend who was going through it, even considered offing herself, but in the end she kept going and came out on the other side better and more mature than ever.
It took years, but she’s now in a much better position, stable, and learned valuable life lessons.
She would say she was just surviving, but the desire to keep enduring takes strength, and to those of us who have never been tested like that, it is absolutely, 100% strength of character and will.
Yup. It gets really dark and heavy at times but we survive. Sadly it’s often only when you get out of it that you can see how much strength you really had.
Hindsight is 20/20, after all.
Strength sometimes is about things out of our control. I’d argue that most times. Many people are fragile because of reasons out of their control as well. We’re all the sum of circumstances, evolutionary programming, social programming etc. The choices we make, we make them because of a lot of things out of our control. It’s hard to argue we even have free-will sometimes (but I do believe we do).
Yeah I’m still on the fence about free will. I believe more and more we are just following our programming and reacting to our environment and our thoughts are just us reading and executing code. Then again I might just be insane 🤷
Buddhists believe the same thing, in a way. I find comfort in my beliefs when they coincide with real old shit. Ancient philosophers or religions, etc. the older the better. Maybe I’M insane 🤷♂️
Oh, that’s interesting. I definitely understand what you mean by finding comfort in those things.
For me it goes both ways. Like yes it is comforting because it feels like yeah maybe there’s something there, but also like damn, we’ve been pondering the same thing for thousands of year and we still don’t know anything. Which I guess can also be seen as comforting depending on how you look at it.
To be fair, I think that at this point in time, we’re all a little insane. It’s a necessary survival skill.
I feel like we do have the answer. We’ve had it for a long time. Basically since the first records, we had it. Which makes me believe we had it before as well. But we always forget it, from our “conscious collective mind”, as in from the mainstream or zeitgeist. And then rediscover it again and again, in different words. But we have the answer, we always had it.
I recently realized that it’s pretty evident I’m autistic to others after watching a video of me being interviewed. I had a reaction to that which is relevant to this comic. I wondered, “Wait, when people give me praise, is it because they think I have brain problems, so they’re not authentic, rather just encouraging me?” My autism therapist said that it could be both, but probably most of them are authentic because I have some strengths that I don’t realize I have. I guess I do some things naturally that most people would have difficulty with or not even be capable of. So maybe sometimes when people say you’re strong, they really mean it, but for reasons you might not be aware of.
To my knowledge, that is actually a thing. People with Autism, as well as people with ADHD, tend to be a bit better at some things that people without usually struggle with for one reason or another. Basically just down to differences of how their brain works with vs without Autism/ADHD. And due to those differences being all you’ve ever known in your experience, it’s hard to know what might make something easier for you, as it just comes naturally, while other things might be completely unnatural to you compared to someone without. I can’t exactly recall anything specific without doing some searching, but doing so would probably give some answers.
Also, side point but I only thought about it a bit later despite it being your first sentence. Something also common with Autism is that it’s significantly easier to tell when someone else has it when you do as well, and vice versa, where people without Autism might not ever even tell unless they’re maybe more familiar with it.
Removed by mod
ALL therapists are lying
Do you need to talk to someone? I get this and have gone through this.
Evidence?
I only recently found out I have ASD, but this little comic perfectly sums up the words I’ve been struggling to conceptualize my entire life.
Thanks for this.
Maybe the point is to be told you are “so strong” feels invalidating because the lived experience of it doesn’t feel strong. Instead it feels otherwise. I think it does take strength to simply survive adversity, but talking about it needs to acknowledge both that it takes strength to survive adversity and that it doesn’t feel to the person doing the surviving like they are strong.
Why did he say “you’re so strong” afterwards?
He’s asserting dominance
Ok, but plants generally love to have their roots under rocks because water is more likely to be absorbed and protected through dry times. Maybe the rocks are too hot if it is south facing? I would expect the daisy in the flat clay lawn to die first. Forgive if this doesn’t add to the conversation.
Do they? Have you actually asked them though?
art source : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Bm9A6r
But surviving in a hard situation you have no choice about is being strong
The strength you are referring to is about a choice not taken.
