Resilience in Uncertain Times

Original post https://substack.com/home/post/p-185249364

I know I’m supposed to post here with some regularity, but right now my thoughts are moving faster than structure. For a while, I’m writing simply to unload what’s alive in me. Consistency can come later.

Today, I want to write about resilience. Not the motivational kind, but the lived one.

Resilience is showing up for me in two very different, very personal ways.

The first is through the current state of affairs in the United States.

I am an immigrant. I came here years ago, during a time when the U.S. was seen as a land of opportunity. A place to begin again. I arrived on vacation and stayed. I met my now ex-husband, had children, and built a career that rose faster than I ever expected.

For a long time, I imagined I would eventually leave. I’ve been traveling since I was ten, and permanence was never part of my original design. But children change your center of gravity. Stability stops being theoretical and becomes essential.

So I stayed.

And some days, I stay terrified, watching patterns unfold that I was taught, in European classrooms, could never repeat themselves. I feel shame, disbelief, and grief that grown adults can be so consumed by fear and hatred, so willing to strip others of dignity.

I read widely. I try to understand. I look for nuance. And often, I find no answers, only more weight.

Resilience, here, is not constant engagement.

It is knowing when to step back.

I take breaks (sometimes for weeks) to protect my nervous system from the relentless flood of outrage and despair. I stay informed, act where I can, and then choose preservation over collapse.

But resilience, for me, has also taken a quieter, more radical form.

In the face of cruelty, I choose kindness.

In the face of division, I choose to try to build community.

Connecting to my truest self has made this clear: kindness is not naïve, and community is not passive. They are deliberate acts of resistance. A refusal to become hardened. A rebellion against the fear, isolation, and dehumanization that dominate so much of what we see today.

This is how I stay human.

The second place resilience has shaped me is in my professional life.

For years, I survived and thrived in corporate environments. I moved up in every company by adapting quickly, learning relentlessly, aligning myself and then aligning others. I planned, fixed, solved, and carried what needed carrying.

Until one day, I realized that this version of resilience had quietly become self-erasure.

The hardest act of resilience I’ve known was stepping away. Not because I failed, but because I succeeded at something that no longer fit. Walking away meant facing uncertainty without armor, without titles, without a plan that impressed anyone but me.

It meant returning to a version of myself I had left behind long ago. The creative, brave, unapologetic one who existed before survival became her primary skill.

Finding her again has required more strength than climbing any ladder ever did.

I don’t know how this chapter unfolds.

I don’t have a neat resolution or a five-step framework.

But I do know this:

Resilience is not endurance at all costs.

It is staying soft in a hard world.

It is choosing connection over isolation.

It is building something good in defiance of what feels broken.

Something tells me that in upcoming years we will need this more than ever.

And above all it is not giving up.

Especially on myself.