National Get Up Day lands at an interesting time of year. January ends, winter still feels long, and many people are already tired of pushing toward goals they set just a few weeks ago. The ice-skating connection makes sense because skating teaches something most of us resist learning in life: that falling is not failure. Falling is part of learning how to move forward with any kind of grace.
The older I get, the more I realize that perseverance is rarely dramatic. It is not usually the movie-montage moment when everything turns around and suddenly makes sense. More often, it is waking up and choosing to participate in life again after something has happened that fundamentally changed you.
I have lived through things that, on paper, should have taken me out emotionally, spiritually, or physically. I have survived almost being kidnapped. I have lived inside toxic relationships that slowly convinced me I was smaller than I was created to be. I grew up in dysfunctional family dynamics that shaped how I understood love and safety. I have survived sexual assault. I have lived inside chronic illness and the exhaustion that comes with fighting your own body while still trying to show up for the people who need you.
There is a specific scene that has stayed with me from Veronica Mars. At the end of season 4, Logan leaves a voicemail for his therapist, talking about why he wants to marry Veronica. Not because of fairy tale romance, but because he respects her, because he wants to be like her, because he wants their children to inherit her strength. Later, after he is gone, Veronica hears those words, and you can see it hit her that he saw something in her she had never fully seen in herself. Her eyes fill with tears because he believed she was strong enough to survive anything, and he never realized that, in many ways, he had been one of the things helping her survive.
That moment resonates deeply with me because sometimes strength is not loud or visible. Sometimes it is something other people see in you long before you recognize it yourself.
For me, that strength is not something I manufactured. My strength is found through Jesus Christ. There have been seasons where I was functioning, but spiritually and emotionally, I was barely holding together. There were moments when I lacked the energy to be resilient in the way people celebrate it. What I did have was the ability to say, “I cannot carry this by myself anymore,” and to place that weight somewhere bigger than me.
When Scripture talks about casting your cares on Him, or about His yoke being easy and His burden being light, I do not read that as life becoming simple or painless. I read it as permission to stop pretending I am supposed to be able to carry trauma, grief, fear, and responsibility on my own shoulders. Faith, for me, has become less about performance and more about surrender in the healthiest sense of the word.
Many of us are also navigating adulthood while unpacking emotional neglect from childhood. That is a quieter struggle, but it is incredibly real. When you grow up learning that your emotions are inconvenient, that love is tied to performance, or that your needs are secondary to keeping the peace in a chaotic environment, you enter adulthood already carrying extra emotional weight. Healing from that is not quick or linear, but there are resources and voices out there helping people understand that what they experienced was real and that healing is possible.
National Get Up Day is not really about pretending everything is fine. It is about acknowledging that life knocks people down in ways that are sometimes deeply unfair, and still choosing to stand again, even if standing looks like moving slower, asking for help, or completely redefining what success and strength look like.
If you are in a season where you feel strong, use that strength to encourage someone else. If you are in a season when you feel fragile, know that fragility and resilience can coexist in the same person.
Getting up does not always mean charging forward. Sometimes it means staying. Sometimes it means healing. Sometimes it means learning to receive love, support, and grace in ways you were never taught were possible.
If today feels heavy, you are not alone. And if all you can do today is take one step toward stability, peace, or faith, that is still getting up.
And sometimes, the most powerful kind of perseverance is simply deciding that your story is not over yet.
THE OUBAITORI EDIT 
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