A Resilience Story: Broken and Beautiful

People often describe resilience as simply enduring hardship, but I’ve learned it’s far more than that. Resilience isn’t a single act of recovery, it’s an ongoing process of adapting, healing, and rising after life knocks us down. Everyone faces different kinds of fires: financial struggles, heartbreak, illness, or loss. What matters is not avoiding the flames, but finding the strength to walk through them and emerge transformed: like a phoenix from the ashes.

What Resilience Really Means

Resilience is not:

• Perfection: it doesn’t mean you never break down.

• Isolation:  it isn’t about shouldering everything alone in silence.

• Toughness:  it isn’t about pretending nothing hurts.

  
  

Instead, resilience is:

• Flexibility when life changes without warning.

• Ability to keep moving, physically and emotionally, even in the face of adversity

• Courage to keep moving when the path is unclear.

• Faith that even loss can lead to new beginnings.

  
  

Resilience isn’t born in comfort. It’s forged in fire. For me, that fire has taken different shapes across the years… leaving my home country as a student with nothing but hope and grit, and later, facing life stressors that shook the ground beneath me. Each time, I thought I might not rise again. And yet, somehow, I did.

Resilience as Survival:

When I first came to the U.S. as a student, I carried hope, two suitcases, and very little else. Resilience then looked like survival. I was a young student, alone in a foreign country with no safety net and no social supports to lean on. I worked 20 hours a week for minimum wage as a graduate assistant while trying to keep up with my studies and adjusting to life with roommates.

This was before the days of Uber, when not having a car meant structuring my life around favors and long walks. I would wait until someone could give me a ride to the laundromat or grocery store, and when no one was available, I walked for miles to buy essentials. I still remember having to stop several times on the way back because my arms ached from the weight of grocery bags. Survival was many nights of ramen dinners, thrift store clothes, and spending long hours in the campus computer labs to finish assignments because I had no laptop or internet of my own. It was the constant challenge of finding my way in a culture that felt both exciting and overwhelming. That was when I learned what it truly meant to be absolutely alone.

Those years taught me that resilience often looks ordinary: showing up for class despite exhaustion, stretching every dollar to make it last, and choosing persistence over despair. In those small, relentless choices, survival became its own kind of strength and I began to understand that resilience is not built through grand gestures, but through the quiet adaptations and steady persistence of everyday life.

They also taught me independence and discipline. But back then I believed resilience was only about enduring hardship until things eventually got easier.

But survival was only the beginning. As life unfolded, I realized resilience was not just about getting through the day but about navigating storms that reached far deeper than exams or rent. It’s a process of healing, rebuilding, and finding strength even in invisible struggles.

Resilience as a process:

Life has a way of testing us in ways we never expect. Resilience meant facing private storms that only you were aware of, the unraveling of trust, the heartbreak of loss, and the courage it takes to start over when the life you imagined suddenly collapses. These struggles were invisible from the outside, yet they demanded more strength than any classroom or workplace ever did.

Looking back, I see resilience not as a single battle I fought as a student, a spouse, or a parent, but as a thread woven through my entire life. More often than not, it was about holding myself together when no one else knew I was falling apart. Resilience is not about being unbreakable; it’s about allowing yourself to be broken and still finding the courage to rise.

And through that process, something unexpected happened: resilience didn’t harden me, it softened me.

Stronger, but softer:

Over time, I’ve had people tell me they use me as an example when they speak about emotional resilience. Some have even said they don’t know how I keep going after my recent extreme life stressors. They ask me how I can stay smiling, kind, and loving after everything I’ve been through. The truth is, I often ask myself the same question: How do I do it?

And the answer, I think, lies in trust. Not the trust that others will always show up for me, but the trust I’ve built in myself. I know that whatever happens, I will find a way to adapt and navigate through it. I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.

When people ask if I am okay, I smile and say, ‘I am always okay.’ Not because life is easy or because I never struggle, but because I know that whatever challenges come my way, I will find my way through. That trust in myself is the deepest resilience of all.

But does resilience mean your heart has hardened and you no longer care, just so life feels easier?  No. Not at all. On the contrary, resilience softened me, made me love harder, and feel more deeply. Out of my own struggles grew a capacity for love and kindness greater than I ever imagined. What surprised me most was that resilience didn’t make me tougher in the way people imagine. It made me more open, more tender, more compassionate.

Two Metaphors for Resilience: The Phoenix and Kintsugi

The phoenix symbolizes dramatic rebirth, rising fierce and new from the ashes of destruction. To me, it represents those moments in life when everything familiar burns away, whether through loss, heartbreak, or unexpected change and you are forced to begin again. The rebirth is not easy or instant, but like the phoenix, we emerge carrying both the memory of the fire and the strength it gave us.

But resilience can also be quieter, more tender.

In Japan, there is an art called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The cracks don’t disappear; they are illuminated. The object is not diminished but made more beautiful because it was broken. Resilience is much the same. Our scars don’t erase us, they redefine us. We learn to live with them, to integrate them, and even to let them shine.

Together, these images capture the truth of resilience: sometimes we rise boldly from the fire, and other times we carry our brokenness with grace, lined with gold.

How Resilience Is Built

• Through daily practice: choosing to show up even when you’d rather give up.

• Through reframing: seeing setbacks as chapters, not endings.

• Through support: drawing strength from people who believe in us, even when we doubt ourselves.

• Through self-compassion: forgiving ourselves for stumbling along the way.

  
  

When people think of resilience, they often imagine strength that never bends. But my journey has taught me something different... that resilience is not about withstanding calamities without falling apart or one great comeback. It is about countless small risings, day after day. And that’s true for all of us.

True resilience is not about being unbreakable, it is about adapting, healing, and transforming into something even more beautiful, especially when life tests us with its hardest challenges. It is about rising from the ashes and choosing to try one more time. The fire does not only change us; it creates us.

“Like a phoenix, we are reborn not despite the fire, but because of it.”

A Resilience Story: Broken and Beautiful