Nobody writes poems about her.

Not the woman in the middle of it. Not the woman before the breakthrough, before the transformation, before the moment things finally shifted.

We celebrate the woman who made it through. We tell her story from the other side. We show the before and the after and we skip, almost entirely, the woman who lived in the during.

She deserves more than that.

Who She Was in the During

She was not graceful. She did not have the words for what was happening to her yet. She was exhausted in ways she could not explain to people who had not felt it, a bone-level tiredness that sleep did not fix and that no one around her seemed to understand.

She was scared more than she admitted. To herself and to everyone else.

डर था, पर दिखने नहीं दिया। यह भी एक तरह की हिम्मत है। There was fear, but she did not let it show. That too is a kind of courage.

She cried in places no one saw. In cars. In bathroom stalls. In that specific ten minutes before she had to compose herself and walk back into her life.

She made mistakes in that period. She was not her best self on many days. She was operating from a depleted place, making decisions with resources she did not fully have, navigating terrain that was genuinely hard.

And she kept going anyway.

The Courage That Never Gets Named

We have a narrow definition of courage. We tend to reserve it for dramatic moments. The big decision. The confrontation. The moment of walking away.

We rarely name the courage of the ordinary day.

The courage it took to get up on a morning when getting up felt impossible. The courage of continuing to show up for the people who needed her when she herself was running on empty. The courage of not knowing how it was going to resolve and choosing to stay present anyway.

The courage of continuing to hope, quietly, privately, in the small hours of the morning, when the evidence around her was not particularly encouraging.

That is not ordinary. That is extraordinary. It simply does not look spectacular from the outside.

Why She Needs to Be Acknowledged

There is a tendency, once we have come through something difficult, to look back at the woman we were in the middle of it with a kind of impatience. With the hindsight of knowing how it resolved, we sometimes judge her for not seeing what we can now see clearly.

We forget that she did not have the ending yet. She was living in the uncertainty.

We forget what it actually cost her to keep going without knowing whether keeping going would work.

She needs to be acknowledged. Not for who you became on the other side. For who she was in the middle.

वो औरत जो टूटते हुए भी खड़ी रही, उसे सलाम। To the woman who stood while she was breaking. Respect.

How to Give Her That Acknowledgement

This is not an abstract exercise. It is a specific, internal act that has a real effect on how a woman carries herself forward.

Sit with her for a moment. Go back to that period in your memory and instead of evaluating her decisions or revisiting what you could have done differently, simply witness her.

She was doing the best she could with what she had. In the context she was in. With the information she had. With the capacity that was available to her at that time.

That is all any of us can ever do.

Tell her that. Tell her she did not fail. Tell her that getting through it was enough. That she did not have to be graceful or wise or composed or anything other than exactly what she was.

And then bring her forward with you. Because the woman you are now was built from everything she survived. She is not separate from you. She is the foundation.

The Integration of the Whole Story

Healing is not about leaving the difficult chapters behind. It is about integrating them. About understanding that the woman in the during was not a lesser version of you. She was a necessary part of the full story.

Every stage of your life was real. Every struggle was real. Every tear that fell in a car or a bathroom stall was real and it mattered and it was not wasted.

It was all part of building the woman who is reading this.

And that woman is worth acknowledging. The whole of her. Not just the parts that look good in the story from the outside.

Are you ready to do this work?

Acknowledging and integrating the difficult parts of your story is not something you have to do alone.

In my coaching practice, I work with women who are ready to look at their full story, not just the highlights, and build a present that is grounded in everything they have lived through.

If you are ready for that kind of work, I would love to be part of it. Visit ritu-roy.com to learn more. 🤍