Strong and tough?

There's an extremely interesting post called Strong and Tough up at Already Pretty. This quote really spoke to me:

"People have told me all my life that I’m strong. Because I went to college far from home, because I quit all the jobs that made me miserable, because I asked for what I felt I deserved. But I never quite bought it. To me, strength is cultivated, intentional, definite. I felt like I could deal with catastrophe and challenge, but only because I have an excellent autopilot setting: I don’t even THINK about it, I just deal. Is that strength? It sure never felt like it."

(There's supposed to be a way to put this as a quote, however, it doesn't seem to be working today.)

Replace "I went to college far from home, because I quit all the jobs that made me miserable, because I asked for what I felt I deserved" with slightly different things, and I could have written that. I wonder if all "strong" people just have a really good autopilot setting?

Physically, I know I have more upper body strength than most girls my age. I can fake a push-up well enough that my karate teacher doesn't call me out most days, I can do crunches and leg-lifts and chin-ups. However, I was still mildly surprised this past week to discover that lifting suitcases to overhead racks was something I could do quite well and most of my girlfriends couldn't. Maybe I am strong after all, at least physically?