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By OK Tease Co.
Life Threw It, But It Doesn't Get to Keep You Down There Something knocked you flat this week. Maybe it was one big thing, maybe it was a dozen small on...
Something knocked you flat this week. Maybe it was one big thing, maybe it was a dozen small ones stacked on top of each other until the weight of them buckled your knees. And here you are anyway, reading this, which means part of you already knows the truth even if the rest of you can't feel it yet: getting knocked down and staying down are two completely different things, and only one of them is up to you.
That's the whole thing. Life gets to throw it. Life does not get to decide how long you stay on the floor.
Let's not skip the part everyone wants to rush past. You're on the floor. It's real. Whatever put you there was heavy, and I'm not going to hand you a tidy little sentence about how everything happens for a reason and expect you to feel better. Sometimes you can't see the reason. Sometimes it just seems flat unfair, and pretending otherwise would be lying to you.
Here's what I actually believe, from my own life and not from a book: the floor is a place you visit, not an address. You can lie there long enough to catch your breath. You can cry there. You can be furious there. None of that makes you weak. What would make you weak is a thing that doesn't exist, because I have never once met a woman who was actually weak. I've met plenty who thought they were, right up until the moment they had no choice but to find out otherwise.
Women were built for this. I mean that. We come back from things that should flatten a person for good, and we come back carrying kids and jobs and everybody else's needs while we do it. God knew what He was doing when He made the woman. She's a force. You're a force. The floor doesn't change that, it just temporarily makes it hard to remember.
When I was in the thick of my own hard season, I didn't fix anything by thinking my way out of it. I fixed it, or started to, by moving. Not because I was chasing some look. Because moving was the only thing that gave my head a break from itself.
That's the piece nobody tells you. Working out and working on yourself is a stress reliever first and a physical change second. When you start taking care of yourself physically, it starts helping you mentally almost right away, faster than you'd expect. Your body is the only one you get. It's the temple you're stuck with for the whole ride, so you carry it forward whether you feel like it or not. Ten minutes of moving on a day you didn't think you could is worth more than an hour on a day you felt great, because the ten hard minutes are the ones that prove to you who you are.
The point of the movement isn't the body that comes out the other side. It's the being able to carry what you're carrying. You're not shrinking. You're getting strong enough to stand back up under the load and keep walking. The Mayo Clinic has written plenty on how regular physical activity supports your mood and your stress levels, and I'll leave the science to them. All I can tell you is what it did for me. It gave me the door back into my own head.
I want to be honest about faith here because it's a huge part of how I got up off my own floor. My faith carried me through, but not in the neat way people sometimes imagine. It wasn't a moment where everything suddenly made sense and I felt peace wash over me. It was the version where I couldn't see the reason for any of it, and I kept going anyway. Trusting the process even when the process seems unfair. Trusting that life turns around the minute you start turning it around for yourself.
That's not a slogan. That's the actual mechanism. I was a single mom with two kids and no map, and the thing that eventually changed everything wasn't luck landing in my lap. It was me deciding to start moving forward before I had any proof it would work out. The greener grass on the other side is real, but you don't get carried to it. You walk. And the first step is always taken on faith, before the view changes.
Here's the part that'll get you off the floor when nothing else will. Somebody small is watching.
They see you in the depths of it. They don't need you to be okay every second, they don't need a performance. What they need to witness is the getting up. The showing up on the day you didn't want to. They're learning what a strong woman does when life throws it, and they're learning it from the only example that counts, which is you. That's the full circle. You overcome it, you're better for it, and they saw the whole thing. You just handed them a blueprint for their own hard days without saying a single word.
You're not going through this for nothing. You're going through it in front of an audience of the people you'd do anything for, and every time you rise, you're showing them exactly how it's done.
This is the whole reason those graphic tees exist, and it has nothing to do with fabric. It's a reminder you can wear. On the days you can't muster the words yourself, you put on something that says what you're too tired to say out loud, and you feel a little of it come back. Strong. Capable. Not done yet, not even close.
Because life threw it. Fine. It always will, and that's not the story. The story is that you're already halfway up, you're stronger than the thing that hit you, and the floor was never where you were going to stay. Keep going. You've got this, even on the days you don't believe me yet.