Does this Tree Trunk Make Me Look Wimpy?

Once upon a time in 1991, in the Arizona desert, a bunch of brains got together and built an entire world under glass.

They called it Biosphere 2.

Inside were eight humans and 3.14 acres of carefully constructed Earth.

A rainforest.

A desert.

A savanna.

A mangrove wetland.

Even a tiny ocean with a coral reef.

They had soil, water, sunlight, plants, animals, oxygen, and enough collective brainpower to make the rest of us feel underqualified to operate a thermostat.

They thought of everything.

Except wind.

The trees inside Biosphere 2 grew quickly.

Protected beneath the glass, they stretched toward the ceiling.

Then some of them began to fall over.

Outside the glass, trees experience wind from the time they are saplings.

Their trunks bend.

Their roots shift against the soil.

Their tissues register the pressure and reinforce the places carrying the greatest load.

The scientific word for this is thigmomorphogenesis, which would be a killer Scrabble play if the board were 19 squares wide.

All that ordinary pushing and pulling changes how a tree grows.

It becomes shorter.

Thicker.

More firmly anchored.

It develops specialized tissue called stress wood or reaction wood, which helps it withstand pressure and support its own weight.

The trees inside Biosphere 2 grew in a world without wind.

The bunch of brains knew what trees needed to grow.

They were still learning what trees needed to hold themselves up.

They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

Women over 40 also know a little sumpin-sumpin about growing around pressure.

So many of us have survived enough to earn our so strong badge in iron.

Rumor has it we’re never given more than we can handle.

Can we puh-lease call bullshit on whoever keeps overestimating our badassery?

We earned that badge through divorces, diagnoses, betrayals, deaths, disappointments, caregiving, reinvention, and years spent keeping everybody else alive, employed, fed, calm, organized, and reasonably convinced we were fine.

People call us resilient.

Capable.

Independent.

Good in a crisis.

Strong becomes the nicest available word for how much we carried and how little help we received.

Then everyone starts sending thank-you notes to the things that hurt us.

Divorce gets credit for our independence.

Betrayal gets credit for our discernment.

Illness gets credit for showing us what matters.

Trauma gets credit for our strength.

Meanwhile, we were the ones doing all the work.

The wind blew.

The tree built itself around the pressure.

Our nervous systems did the same.

When life repeatedly taught us that love could disappear, safety could evaporate, or one wrong move could cost us belonging, our brains started preparing for impact.

We learned to read rooms before we entered them.

We heard the microscopic change in someone’s voice.

We noticed a mood moving through the house before anyone said a word.

We anticipated needs before they were spoken.

We became useful.

Agreeable.

Impressive.

Undemanding.

Impossible to abandon.

Or at least we tried.

Some of us became fiercely independent because depending on other people kept arriving with an invoice.

Some of us became perfectionists because mistakes were treated as evidence against us.

Some of us became people-pleasers because keeping everyone else comfortable helped keep us safe.

Some of us became the emergency contact for everyone while quietly deleting ourselves from the list.

We practiced these skills until they moved into our bones.

Eventually, we called them personality.

I’m just responsible.

I’m good in a crisis.

I don’t need much.

It’s easier if I do it myself.

I can always tell when something is off.

And we can.

Our nervous systems have spent decades rehearsing.

What happened to us became braided through the root system.

We wrapped skills around injuries.

We sent roots toward whatever safety we could find.

We reinforced the places that kept taking pressure.

Trauma became part of the binding agent because we had to build around it.

After enough years, the injury and the adaptation can feel fused together.

Which creates one hell of a question:

If trauma helped shape our roots, what happens when we heal?

If hypervigilance helped us survive, who are we when we stop scanning the room?

If independence kept us safe, what happens when we let someone help?

If being useful secured our place, do we still belong when we need something?

If perfectionism protected us from criticism, what happens when we make a mistake?

Healing can feel like we’re threatening the entire tree.

Of course we resist it.

Our brains remember the jobs these adaptations performed.

They remember what happened before we learned to anticipate, appease, perfect, disappear, or take care of everything ourselves.

They remember the pressure.

They remember how we survived it.

They need evidence that the emergency has ended.

A tree experiences manageable resistance and adjusts its growth.

Human beings also build capacity through challenges that arrive with enough safety, choice, support, and recovery.

Trauma overwhelms those resources.

The storm exceeds the structure available to hold it.

Sometimes we grow around the damage because growing around it is the only option we have.

Some things should never have happened.

Some people should have protected us.

Some losses arrived empty-handed, carrying no lesson and offering no gift.

And still, we grew.

Every inch of that growth belongs to us.

My clients are often trying to figure out what belongs to them and what belongs to an old emergency.

This work requires inspecting the root system.

We find discernment.

Resourcefulness.

Creativity.

The ability to begin again.

The knowledge that we can survive the moment after the moment we were certain would destroy us.

We also find roots still wrapped around dangers that have been gone for years.

Hypervigilance may have sharpened our perception.

We can keep the perception and stop treating every room like a crime scene.

People-pleasing may have taught us how to understand other people.

We can keep the empathy and put our own vote back on the ballot.

Perfectionism may have strengthened our attention to detail.

We can keep the excellence and remove flawlessness as the admission price for being seen.

Hyper-independence proved we can take care of ourselves.

We can keep the competence and let somebody else carry a bag.

We can honor an adaptation for its service and let it retire.

We can loosen the bracing and keep the strength.

We can tend the roots without worshipping the storm.

Because we made meaning from what happened.

We searched for resources when none were offered.

We kept moving while we were afraid.

We rebuilt trust after someone damaged it.

We found somewhere safe to hold.

We grew every single inch of these roots.

The strength belongs to us.

The trees inside Biosphere 2 could not prepare for a force they had never experienced.

They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

Neither did the people who built their world.

But we know some things now.

We know we can be proud of our roots without feeling grateful for every storm.

We know loosening our grip will never erase the strength it took to hold on.

We know healing allows us to carry our strength into a life where survival is no longer its full-time job.

We don’t thank the wind for the tree.

Take the credit for who you’ve become.