Anjelis Oliveira, PhD, MHA, RN

I Spent Years Proving I Could Survive. Learning to Care for Myself Was Harder

For much of my life, I believed strength meant being able to handle whatever was placed in front of me. I knew how to figure things out, keep moving, take responsibility, and show up when other people needed me. Those qualities helped me survive difficult seasons and eventually helped me build a life and career I am proud of. What took me much longer to understand was that the skills that help us survive are not always the same skills we need to create a life that is healthy, peaceful, and sustainable.

I cannot point to one moment when I learned that I had to be strong. I do remember learning very early that I needed to figure things out for myself. My mother was not there, my father was not there, and by 16, I was largely on my own. There was no carefully developed philosophy behind it. The sentiment was much simpler: no one is coming, so I have to figure this out.

When my children were born, that responsibility took on a different meaning. People were depending on me now. In many ways, my children gave me something to live for during a period when I did not really have that for myself. Whatever happened, I needed to keep going because they needed me to keep going.

That became part of my identity long before I had language for it.

I Became the Person Who Could Handle It

I never wanted strength to mean being emotionless or stoic. One of the lessons I was fortunate to understand relatively early was that I could not control other people's actions, but I could control how I responded to them. That belief carried me through many seasons of my life, and I still believe there is tremendous power in recognizing what is and is not within our control.

At the same time, some of my drive came from anger. Some of it came from wanting to prove people wrong. I learned how to take difficult circumstances and turn them into fuel. That fuel helped me raise my children, become a nurse, continue my education, build a healthcare career, and accomplish things that earlier versions of me could not have imagined.

The problem was not that resilience, independence, or personal responsibility were bad qualities. They were necessary qualities for me for a very long time. The problem was that I did not always recognize when they had gone too far.

There were periods of my adult life when I worked four or five jobs. At times, I held two full-time positions. I took on enormous financial responsibility and became accustomed to being the provider. Asking for help could feel like weakness because I had built so much of my identity around being the person who could figure things out.

I was also the person who showed up. I wanted to be the friend who showed up, the mother who showed up, the partner who showed up, and the professional who could be counted on. There is nothing wrong with being dependable. The problem was that I sometimes showed up for everyone else at my own detriment.

For years, I considered that evidence of strength.

When Strength Becomes Over-Responsibility

It has only been within the last few years that I have started to see some of those patterns differently. Personal responsibility can become over-responsibility when we begin carrying things simply because we are capable of carrying them. Independence can become isolation when receiving help feels uncomfortable. Resilience can become a reason to tolerate situations longer than we should because we have already proven that we can survive them.

I did not lose those traits, nor would I want to. Personal responsibility remains one of my strongest values. What has changed is that I am becoming more intentional about where I direct it.

Just because I can solve a problem does not always mean it is mine to solve. Just because I can carry something does not automatically mean I should. Just because I have survived difficult circumstances before does not mean surviving should remain the standard by which I measure the quality of my life.

Those distinctions sound simple when written on a page. Living them has taken much more work.

Sometimes a Wake-Up Call Is Not Enough

At 39, I had a stroke. You would think experiencing something that significant at a relatively young age would automatically reorganize the way a person lives. It certainly got my attention, but looking back, I can see that it did not immediately change the deeper patterns that had shaped my life.

Later, during my wellness transformation certification, I learned a metaphor called Niagara Syndrome. It describes the way we can move through life almost sleepwalking, carried by the current of responsibilities, circumstances, habits, and expectations without intentionally deciding where we are going. Eventually, we reach the ledge of the waterfall, and something major happens that forces us to pay attention.

My stroke was one of those waterfall moments. It interrupted my life, but interruption and transformation are not the same thing. I recovered and eventually returned to many of the behaviors I already knew. I went back to working, carrying, achieving, and pushing through because those were the skills that had served me for most of my life.

I had survived another difficult thing. At the time, survival still felt like success.

Eventually, I Had to Look at the Cost

By the end of 2022, the gap between what I knew about health and the way I was living had become difficult to ignore. I was a nurse and hospital leader who had spent years caring for other people, yet my boundaries were poor in both my work and personal life. I was almost constantly connected to work, rest and recovery had very little protection in my schedule, and I was 278 pounds again after having already lost significant weight more than once.

Around that same period, my son Josh was diagnosed with a pituitary macroadenoma and underwent surgery. There was fear in not knowing what was going to happen and in watching my child experience something so serious while trying to remain strong enough to care for him. I could not control the diagnosis or the outcome. What I could control was whether I was capable of being present for him.

I had recently enrolled in a wellness transformation program, and initially, part of my motivation to take better care of myself was still tied to someone I loved. Josh needed me. That was familiar territory because I had always been able to find another level of strength when someone else needed something from me.

The deeper shift happened more gradually. Through coaching, certification work, journaling, and identity work, I started asking questions that had very little to do with what I was capable of enduring and much more to do with the life I actually wanted to live. I began examining my standards, my boundaries, and the stories I had been telling myself about what strength, responsibility, and worth were supposed to look like.

I began to understand that my health could not always require another person as justification. I could become part of my own reason for taking care of myself.

Receiving Help for Myself Was Different

It would not be accurate for me to say that I never accepted help. There were times in my life when help was absolutely necessary. When I was going through a divorce while attending nursing school, my grandmother, great-aunt, and uncle offered to care for my children in the Dominican Republic. It was heartbreaking, but it was also necessary. I have always believed that caring for a family takes a village, and I was fortunate to have close friends who became family and helped me raise my children.

What I eventually recognized was that I had been much more comfortable receiving help when the help was for my children than when someone wanted to do something for me. Receiving support for them still fit comfortably within my identity as a mother. I was making sure their needs were met. Receiving care for myself required something different. It meant allowing myself to need something without immediately translating that need into weakness or failure.

That has been an ongoing practice. The transformation has not been becoming someone who never feels the old instinct to handle everything alone. Those patterns do not simply disappear because we recognize them. I have become better at noticing them, managing them differently, and challenging the story attached to them.

Sometimes that challenge is as simple as recognizing an old belief and telling myself, “That is not true.”

Caring for Myself Required a Different Internal Dialogue

For much of my life, growth was fueled by some version of believing I needed to be better. I could turn anger into achievement and dissatisfaction into action. That worked often enough that I did not always question the cost.

My wellness transformation required me to learn a different way of speaking to myself. I could still have standards. I could still practice personal responsibility. I could still want more for my health and my life. What had to change was the belief that I needed to dislike the current version of myself in order to become someone better.

That is where the idea of learning to Love Yourself to Health became meaningful for me. It is not about avoiding accountability or convincing myself that everything is fine when it is not. It is about approaching change from love and empathy rather than self-loathing.

The difference is subtle but powerful. One voice tells me that I should be able to handle something and need to push harder. Another asks what I actually need right now. One assumes rest is evidence that I am falling behind. The other recognizes that recovery may be part of what allows me to continue.

I am still learning the difference.

I Do Not Always Know When to Push and When to Stop

If you ask me today how I always know when strength means pushing through and when it means stopping, resting, asking for help, or changing direction, my answer is that I do not. I am still figuring that out.

What has changed is that I am paying attention in a way that I did not before. I am more intentional about how I feel and more willing to pivot when something is no longer working. There was a time when feeling exhausted simply meant I pushed through the exhaustion, even when doing so was detrimental to my health or to the quality of the work I was producing.

Now I am becoming more comfortable recognizing when I need to rest, take a nap, go to bed, change the plan, or give myself grace. Protecting rest and recovery is becoming as important to me as knowing when to push through. That may sound like a small change, but for someone whose identity was built around endurance, it is significant.

Becoming Is Not Something I Finish

The identity work I have done over the last several years has also changed how I think about personal growth. I sometimes describe the person I am today and the person I am becoming as different versions of myself, Version 1.0 and Version 2.0. What I have come to understand is that there is no final Version 2.0.

Once I grow into that version, she becomes the person I am standing in today, and another version begins to emerge.

The woman who was on her own at 16 needed a certain kind of strength. The young mother needed another. The nursing student going through a divorce needed something different again. The healthcare leader, the mother caring for a son facing brain surgery, and the woman learning how to take care of herself have each required different versions of the same person.

I think of life as an infinite game in that sense. There is no permanent finish line where we are declared winners or losers and the work is complete. We are either continuing to participate in our own lives or we are not. Different seasons will continue asking different things of me, and becoming means being willing to respond intentionally instead of assuming that the survival strategies from one season must become the rules for every season that follows.

I am grateful for the resilience that helped me survive. I am proud of the woman who figured things out when she did not know who was coming to help her. I am proud of the mother who showed up, the nurse who kept learning, and the leader who could be counted on. I do not need to reject any of those versions of myself in order to acknowledge that strength means something different to me now.

I spent years measuring my strength by how much I could take on. Today, I measure it by how well I take care of myself.