The day Superwoman started crying

This morning Superwoman woke up and started crying, something that has been happening quite often lately, although she is not crying because she is sad and she is not even entirely sure why she is crying. There is simply something inside her that can no longer maintain the shape it has held for so many years, something that is slowly giving in under the pressure of having to be capable of everything, of always knowing what to do, of carrying what needs to be carried without ever asking whether it was hers to carry in the first place.

Her strong shoulders, the ones she has always relied on and built much of her identity around, no longer feel like the Pillars of Hercules they once were. They are becoming softer, losing some of their rigidity, beginning to resemble the shoulders of a gentle and sensual woman rather than those of someone permanently preparing for the next battle. There is something beautiful in this transformation, but there is also something profoundly frightening, because Superwoman has been carrying the weight of the world since she was nine years old and when you have carried something for that long, putting it down is not as simple as feeling relieved.

The weight becomes familiar, and eventually familiarity begins to resemble identity.

She knows that she can slowly start putting some of it down now, and still she is afraid, because she has no idea what will happen when she is no longer the strong one. She wonders how the people around her will react and whether they will still love her when she is not the person who always knows, fixes, carries and performs, whether there will still be a place for her when she cannot offer strength as proof of her value. Somewhere inside her lives the fear that without Superwoman there might be very little left, as though removing the costume could somehow make the woman wearing it disappear too.

And yet the costume has become too small.
It is tight around her chest now, restricting her breath, pressing against a body that no longer wants to live inside it, and what once protected her has slowly started hurting her. Her body knows this before her mind is willing to accept it and has already begun to show her that there is a limit to how long a person can remain strong by force.

This is why not knowing scares her so much.
Not knowing what will happen, not being able to anticipate the next movement, not having control over what other people will do or how life will unfold are not new fears. They belong to a much older place, to the little girl who learned that being excellent could make her reliable but not necessarily visible, that performing exceptionally well could eventually become something people simply expected from her, and that being capable often meant nobody thought to ask whether she needed help.

There is a strange loneliness in being the person everyone believes will be fine.
The more capable you become, the easier it is for the people around you to assume that you need nothing, and the easier it becomes for you to believe it too. You learn how to hide the empty spaces so well that eventually nobody knows they exist, and then one day you look around and wonder why nobody ever came to sit beside you there.

Superwoman is beginning to understand this now, and with that understanding comes another question she does not particularly want to answer: if being strong was never enough to guarantee love and approval, what will happen when she stops being strong?
The possibility of finding nothing on the other side terrifies her.
There has never been anyone with her in that emptiness, or at least this is how she has always understood it, but the truth is more complicated because she has never really shown that emptiness to anyone. She has shown the solutions, the competence, the independence, the version of herself that could get up and continue, but the void itself remained carefully hidden somewhere behind the costume.
Now something has changed because she can no longer pretend with the same conviction.
The emptiness is becoming harder to hide and instead of filling it as quickly as possible, she is beginning to wonder what would happen if she simply allowed it to exist. What if fear, softness, uncertainty, need and vulnerability did not have to be corrected or hidden before they could be shown to another person? What if they could exist alongside everything else without making her less capable, less worthy or less herself?

This is the kind of strength Superwoman is being asked to learn now, a strength that has very little to do with holding everything together and much more to do with remaining present when things are not held together at all.

To be inside uncertainty without immediately trying to solve it, to allow things to happen without preparing herself for every possible ending, to ask for help before reaching the point where there is no other option and to discover that softness does not necessarily mean becoming fragile.

This is difficult for Superwoman because control has served her well. It has protected her, given her direction and allowed her to move through situations in which she did not feel she could depend on anyone else, so letting go of some of that control does not immediately feel like freedom. Sometimes it feels much more like standing somewhere unfamiliar without knowing exactly who will stay beside her.
And this is the real test now.
Not whether she can survive another difficult moment, because she already knows she can, but whether she can allow herself to be seen inside it.
Whether she can resist the instinct to disappear until she has everything under control again, whether she can let someone see the confusion before it has become clarity, the fear before it has become courage, the exhaustion before it has been transformed into another achievement.
For most of her life Superwoman has protected Elisa, but she has also kept her hidden.
There was always another woman underneath that costume, one who did not need to earn her place by carrying more than everyone else, one who did not need to perform perfectly to deserve affection and one who did not need an answer for everything in order to feel safe.

The frightening part is that Elisa does not yet know exactly who she is without Superwoman.

And she does not need to know yet.
Identity does not have to be replaced immediately. There can simply be some space between the woman she had to become and the woman she is becoming now.

Superwoman does not need to disappear dramatically and she does not need to be rejected as though all those years of strength were somehow a mistake. She had a purpose. She protected, achieved, endured and kept moving when moving was necessary.
She simply does not need to do all of it anymore.

Underneath the costume there is Elisa, learning to see herself without immediately measuring what she can provide, solve or endure. Elisa who can begin to accept that there is a place for her in other people's lives even when she is not useful, impressive, productive, composed or strong.

She can show up without having everything figured out. She can show her scars without turning them into proof of how much she can survive. She can allow the people who love her to see the parts she once believed she needed to hide from them.
And after a lifetime spent learning how to carry things alone, this is the harder thing to learn.

How to put something down.

How to say I don't know.

How to say I can't do this today.

How to need someone without feeling weaker for needing them.

How to trust that love will not disappear the moment strength does.

Superwoman's battles do not need to continue forever simply because fighting is what she knows how to do.
She has spent enough of her life proving how much she can carry.
Now Elisa can learn what it feels like to put it down.