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By OK Tease Co.
What Does It Mean to Rise Above, Really? It Is Not the Highlight Reel Rising above sounds like a movie ending. The music swells, everything makes sense,...
Rising above sounds like a movie ending. The music swells, everything makes sense, and the woman walks off into a golden field looking like she was never scared a day in her life.
That version has never once shown up at my door, and I doubt it has shown up at yours. Real rising above is a lot quieter, a lot messier, and honestly a lot slower than anyone tells you.
It usually looks like getting up on a Tuesday when you would rather not, and doing the next thing anyway.
Here is what nobody says out loud. You can be rising above something and still be sitting in the middle of it.
The house is still too quiet on the mornings they are gone. The fear that you are not going to make it still knocks around in your chest at ten at night. None of that has to disappear for you to be climbing.
Rising above is not the absence of the hard thing. It is you, still moving, while the hard thing is still true. Both at once.
That is the whole trick, and it is the part that makes women feel like failures when really they are doing exactly what strength looks like.
We keep waiting for one big moment where we prove we made it. A finish line. A day where we can finally exhale and say, there, I did it.
That day is a myth. What is real is fifty small choices that nobody sees and nobody claps for.
You drank the water. You got everyone fed. You handled the thing at school by yourself and did not fall apart in the parking lot.
You moved your body for fifteen minutes when your head told you to skip it. Stack enough of those and you look up one day and realize you are not the same woman who started. That is rising above.
It was happening the whole time, in the boring stuff.
I will keep saying this because it changed everything for me. Movement is a stress reliever before it is ever about how you look.
When you take care of yourself physically, it starts helping your head almost right away. The walk, the twenty minutes, the sweat that beats the second cup of coffee. It is not about shrinking yourself.
It is about being able to carry what you are carrying.
You only get the one body, and it is the thing that has to haul you up and out of a hard season. Rising above is a physical act as much as a mental one. You cannot climb on an empty tank forever, and you were never meant to.
This is where faith comes in for me, in my own way. Some seasons feel flat unfair, and I am not going to pretend they do not.
The answer comes late. Or it comes for someone else first while you are still waiting. Or it does not come in the shape you asked for at all.
I do not have a tidy version of this where it all suddenly makes sense on cue.
What I have is this: I keep going anyway. I trust that there is a reason I cannot see yet, and that not seeing it does not mean it is not there. Rising above sometimes means you climb without proof the top exists, and you find out later that it did.
If you are a mom, here is the part that ties it all together. Your kids are watching you do this. All of it.
The hard morning that fell apart and the way you got everyone where they needed to be anyway.
They do not need a mom who never struggles. They need one who struggles and keeps going, because that is the script they will reach for on their own hard days.
When they see you go down into the depths of a season and come back up, better for it, that shows them what is possible for them. You are not failing in front of them when it is hard. You are teaching them.
That is the full circle, and you are living it whether you feel like it or not.
I think we have it backwards. We treat rising above like a trophy you earn once and get to keep on a shelf.
It is more like a habit. A thing you do again on Monday and again on Thursday, on the good days and especially on the ones where you do not feel like yourself at all. You do not arrive at strong.
You practice strong, over and over, until it becomes who you are.
And you are not meant to do it in a vacuum. Half of what makes it possible is knowing other women are in it too, that you are seen and you are not the only one white-knuckling a hard stretch. That is the whole reason a community like OK Tease Co. exists, so the woman on her worst day has somewhere to land and someone who gets it.
You do not come out the other side as the old you, restored to factory settings. That woman is not walking back through the door, and that is not the loss it feels like.
You come out as someone new. Someone who knows what she can survive because she already did. Someone a little braver, a little more sure of her own two feet.
Rising above, really, is just this: you keep choosing to get up, and one day you realize you are standing somewhere the old you never could have. You built that. Nobody handed it to you.
And on the days you forget how strong you are, let this be your reminder that you have got you, and you always did.