Poorna Bell’s husband died in May 2015. While grieving her husband, she began to realise that without building her physical strength, she’d never achieve real independence.

“In that unspoken contract of heterosexual relationships, Rob was assigned bin duty and being the luggage monkey, while I did the supermarket shop and organised our holidays,” she writes for Stylist. “But around a year after he died, I realised that I had to make myself stronger – if only for reasons of practicality.”

Bell hired a personal trainer and began weight training.

“I started to experience things I never had before. For a start, the free weights section no longer scared me. I also realised that weight lifting – something I had always associated with injury – was safe as long as you had someone to teach you good form.”

And soon, her outer strength became inner strength, too. She writes: “When you’re grieving and in a bad place – no matter the shape of your loss – you can feel like you exist in a place of chaos. Getting stronger made me feel that there was one small corner of my life that I could positively change, even if all around me was wreckage.”

Soon, Bell was competing in — and winning — lifting competitions.

“From time to time I look about my life and weight lifting and I wonder what Rob would have made of it if he was still alive. It’s a hard place to visit emotionally because I know all this came from a place of pain and necessity. But I also knew my husband and what he loved about me, and I think he would be proud that I carved my strongest physical self out of unimaginable loss.

“On competition day, I wear my wedding ring on a necklace. I may not ever be able to tell Rob what I’ve achieved, but when I touch the ring before each final lift, I feel he’s with me. And whether it’s real or not, it tells me that strength of all kinds can come out of loss.”

“Why I lift”: Poorna Bell on finding outer and inner strength through weight lifting