When my friend asked me to write on the topic of resilience, I was both humbled and terrified. Who am I to speak on such a weighty subject? I’m hardly an expert on resilience and I’m not a therapist — but I am a diligent student of my own life. I share my story because I suspect it is much like your own. I write to reclaim my broken pieces and transform them into something new and beautiful for others — something like hope.
For weeks, I’ve thought about what to write, scrawling a hundred different thoughts on dozens of pieces of paper. Despite my effort, the words didn’t feel like truth — the real and gritty “stuff” that makes for meaningful storytelling. Then, recently, life presented me with a challenge that has left me feeling undeniably vulnerable. Suddenly, the words feel different — like they matter. In its own mysterious way, I suppose writing is, itself, an act of resilience.
I’ve thrown away the initial scraps of paper and instead speak from a place of truth, a place that hurts — the place where resilience is born.
It is July 1, 2015. My alarm goes off. I am at once both awake and asleep. The gentle, familiar tones drone on as I struggle to open my eyes, now swollen and crusted-shut. This is the only moment of peace I will feel that day — the moment when I’ve forgotten that my father and soulmate has just died unexpectedly at the age of 61.
Three years later, in July 2018, I am on the verge of ending a relationship that I have intuitively known isn’t right for me for a long time, despite my valiant fight to preserve it. It is midday. The hot summer sun is strong, spilling out in neatly patterned streaks across the ceiling. I feel so utterly hopeless as I listen to the laughter of children playing outside — the contrast is implausible. I sob for this new sense of loss, this fresh grief of knowing what lies ahead. All I want to do is to be able to call my Dad. Hands shaking, I dial the suicide hotline.
The last morning I wake up in the place I’ve come to know as home arrives four months later. I reluctantly load the remainder of my belongings into my car and wonder, “Will he notice this is gone, that I’m gone?” Or worse, “Am I breaking his heart?” I rest on the couch to catch my breath. The person I hoped I would spend my life with sits down beside me, lays his heavy head on my shoulder, and begins to cry. I’ve waited months for his tears to arrive; they are unexpectedly warm. I shed what remains of my own tears, place my hand on his head, and whisper “I know.” My brittle knees hit the floor as I gaze into our dog’s big caramel eyes, remembering him as a helpless puppy, asleep in my arms. I tell him that I will always love him; I know he’s unaware of what’s happening, but I fear it just the same. Then, somehow, I leave.
Eventually, I no longer cry myself to sleep at night. I settle into my new life and fall hard and fast for a charming stranger who promises me the world. I take my perch upon a precariously high pedestal. Impulsively, I risk my career, apartment, and sense of self as I spend the summer blindly following this handsome romancer around the country. Inevitably, his mask falls — the descent is quick and ungracious. I am sharing a bed with Jekyll and Hyde. Soon, my flaws are on trial and the prosecution is ruthless. The bruise on my arm is so pronounced that the woman working at the jewelry store whisks me aside in a safe moment to ask if I’m okay. “Of course,” I say — look at this beautiful necklace he’s bought me! I will not allow myself to believe he is anything less than perfect. It is my turn to be happy.
Then, on what was to be a brief trip home to Boston, five impossibly heavy boxes containing my suitcases and all of my belongings arrive at my door, unannounced. This is how I learn that I will not be moving to California — that there is no happily ever after, that I have recklessly given my heart to a callous monster. Weeping and ashamed, I remove my underwear, clothes, pictures, and toiletries from the boxes, marveling at how carefully he folded each and every piece of me. How cold must a heart be to pack someone away like that? I barely make it to the toilet to vomit. With my head bowed in the most undignified fashion, my intuition waves a parade of bright red flags as if to say, “I told you so.” I’m not entirely certain if I’m laughing or crying, but against the cold tile of the bathroom floor, I vow that this will be the last time I defy my inner compass. And I mean it.
I am cut open, raw, exposed. An unwelcome and icy draft blows through every part of me that was so recently warm, on fire, in “love.” I am reduced to wreckage — the sum of my mistakes, a collection of flaws, a junkyard of unlovable parts. I am a mess of tangled wires, tripped breakers, and faulty engineering. How will I survive this?
And then one day, it clicks. I can handle it. All of it.
I refer to this as the “miracle moment” because that’s exactly how it felt — divine, a gift from God, the loving hand of my father resting in mine. What was once murky and dark was suddenly clear and unmistakable: with time and experience, I had learned to navigate loss with strength and grace. I understood the transience of pain. I would soon take the remnants of my shattered relationship and redefine them as the birthplace of an entirely new way of perceiving and living life. This “failure” was a perfectly-timed opportunity to extend love and compassion toward myself. Reframing the burning landscape as fertile soil for growth was an act of rebellion, of unprecedented resilience. In that moment, I decided who I would become when I walked away from the debris: I would be grateful — and free.
To me, resilience is a combination of cultivating self-compassion, doing the hard work of becoming aware of your inner world (ideally through therapy), allowing space for pain and resisting the urge to bury it, making tough choices, practicing gratitude, and believing in miracles. I realize this is a formidable list and it is okay if it feels overwhelming — each aspect is deserving of deeper examination, slowly, over time. Simply stated, resilience is a skill that can be learned — a system of psychological, emotional, and behavioral muscles that you build and strengthen through the intentional experience of pain and discomfort. With hard work and repetition, you begin to regain courage and reclaim power.
Resilience grows in the space you make for it as a function of your relationship with yourself — the most important relationship of your life. Self-compassion and self-love are the cornerstones of resilience and require purposeful cultivation. Making yourself a priority is, perhaps, the greatest challenge and most radical act of love in the never-ending growth process we call life. The quest for peace will feel like a constant struggle if you disregard the power of your intuition and squander opportunities to learn and grow from your experiences. As someone who tends to put others first, I can assure you that it will be nearly impossible to show up in the way you need to for the people who matter most if you don’t make a faithful and consistent effort to find peace within. I have spent far too much time on airplanes this year, and it is an unavoidable truth that you must secure your own proverbial oxygen mask before tending to anyone else’s.
And while resilience is a powerful tool for navigating life, it is not a preventive mechanism. Changing tides will knock you off-course. Pain will surface — again and again and again. You will lose people you love. You will watch others agonize as they lose people they love. You will fall in love with people who don’t love you back. You might lose your job, your home, your sense of security. You will make hard choices and you will let people down. You will watch people that you care about limit themselves; you will need to accept that you are not responsible for anyone else’s choices. People will change. You will change. Everything will change because that is the very nature of life — it changes.
You will inevitably slip into familiar, self-sabotaging patterns: self-critical thinking, believing you’re not good enough, settling for less than what you deserve. How detrimental to mistake self-criticism for truth. How disheartening to believe you are anything less than more than enough. How painful to settle. When these missteps occur, it is imperative that you offer yourself forgiveness — that you dust yourself off, try again, and build the muscle.
I think of how far I’ve come in the past five years — the painful choices I’ve made, the progress that followed, and the unapologetic way in which I’ve fought for what’s best for me. I find myself amidst a striking new chapter of my life. This is uncharted territory; I am not used to being “okay.” I’ve moved through life much like a chameleon, always dressed in a smile — it feels different to smile when you mean it. I now wholeheartedly accept the truth that I have carelessly doled out pieces of myself that I can never recover. The self-compassion that keeps me warm at night is far more valuable than the weak fragments of myself that needed to break away so I could be free.
I apologize less and less for being who I am; self-acceptance is my most sacred spiritual practice. To honor myself by saying “I am good enough” is an act of God, the Universe, or whatever you want to call it. I care for my intuition as though I’m fine-tuning an instrument. I bestow my inner guide with the respect she deserves for protecting and steering me. I allow myself to really feel discomfort, knowing that I can handle adversity in its many forms. I have developed far greater faith in the Universe than the younger, more skeptical version of me ever imagined possible. I trust that the Universe will bring me precisely what I need at precisely the right time; it has a much better plan for me than I have for myself.
My hope for you is that you experience life as an awakening — a becoming. I hope you are flooded with appreciation and awe. I hope one day you will meet your own eyes in the mirror and burst into tears of joy and relief because you’ve come so far you almost can’t believe it. I hope you struggle to catch your breath, amazed at your own strength, in utter disbelief of how much you’ve endured. I hope you are profoundly proud of how adept you’ve become at soothing yourself and allowing yourself to feel the peace you so desperately deserve. I hope you learn to love yourself over a long period of time and also in your own “miracle moment.” I hope you will hold yourself in your own hands and that it will feel like coming home. I hope you will be patient and gentle as you mend and grow. I hope you will frequently remind yourself that healing takes time and building resilience requires practice.
As for me, I don’t know what comes next — but I know that I will be ready. I will live my life all-in. There’s simply no time left to play small.
Thirty years have gone by. I sit in an Adirondack chair, overlooking a pristine lake, with a quiet mind and a sense of wonder — for the breathtaking scenery, and for the collection of heartbeats that carved the path to this place of peace. If I’m truly blessed, the person who was worth waiting for sits beside me, watching me as I look out at the water (he’s been doing this for years and still doesn’t know that I know when his eyes are locked on me). My past is far from here; the present moment is all that matters to me now. I hum a familiar song and feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for each and every tear that carried me to this moment. Two beautiful German Shepherds lay lovingly and submissively on the deck, lapping at my well-traveled feet.
WRITTEN BY
Lauren Hess
Learner, leader, EdD, imperfect human, and lover of words