What Doesn't Kill You
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
But what if I don’t want to be stronger?
What if stronger sounds
impenetrable
independent
intact
What if I want the hard things in life
to make me soft
What if I want to be softened
to the heartache of others
and to the needs of my own soul
What if I don’t want to pull myself together
but let myself fall apart
What if I want to be broken into a million pieces
so I can be put back together in a way that feels
more like me
than any previous version
and in the search for what that looks like—
the journey of self-discovery—
I will find that I was right to keep myself
soft.
About the author
I'm Morgan Motsinger. I hold a BS in Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience from Portland State University, and I host P.S. We Expire, a podcast about grief, death, and what it takes to live well anyway. I also spent fourteen years caring for my daughter Anni, who died in 2022 (MPSIIIa). I write about grief from both sides of that — what the research says, and what it's actually like inside. Nothing here is medical advice, and I'm not a clinician. It's the explanation I wish someone had handed me.