Ever find yourself having a good cry in the shower—partly because it's the only place you feel free enough to let go your feelings? Brittany Latham knows what that's like.
This 30-year-old photographer from Mobile, Alabama, decided to share an image of a woman crying in the shower on Instagram, captioning it with inspiring words that has hit such a chord, it's already racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
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“For the woman whose husband makes an ‘extra stop’ after work every evening,” she started the post. “For the woman who is mourning the loss of a pregnancy that nobody else knew about.”
Latham continued calling out other cry-worthy scenarios, like losing a job after staying home with a sick child, breaking up with a partner, or enduring unsuccessful IVF treatments. She made it clear that she understands the stress and heartache of these and similar situations.
“For the woman that lives with quiet anxiety because nobody understands what you could possibly be stressed out about,” she wrote. “For the woman that gives to her family all day everyday and just needs a break.”
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Latham ended her post with a message directly related to the photo. “For every single woman that cries in the shower so that nobody else can see. Because if you aren’t strong, nobody is. Just because the water washes your tears doesn’t mean that you don’t cry. I am you. I see you. I am with you, I cry with you.”
Her emotional post struck a nerve. Within days, it went viral on Facebook and has garnered nearly 400,000 reactions and more than 400,000 shares.
Latham tells Health that she was motivated by her own life and other women’s experiences. “The inspiration behind [this] was a collection of various things that I have experienced as a single mom, married mom, and mom of two babies lost to miscarriage,” she says. “I spend a lot of time with my friends and hear their struggles and I thought how resilient women must be sometimes. A lot of times we are the only backbone.”
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In more than 60,000 comments, people celebrated the beauty and power of her words and image. “Wow…I saw myself in many of these words and yes the sun did shine again on me,” one respondent wrote. “This is truth,” said another.
Latham told us that she was shocked her post connecting with so many strangers. “I write a lot of pieces and very few make it out of my journal, so I was just as shocked as anyone when this thing went viral,” she says.
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