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RESILIENCE
Bouncing Back After Life Suddenly Kicks You in the Shins
From two surprise decisions in first grade to earning a PhD
When I walked into first grade, I didn’t just introduce myself — I reintroduced myself. Gone was the little girl with long hair that reached halfway down her back. In her place stood someone new, someone with a boyish haircut and a name trimmed down from a formal double-barrel first-and-middle combo to something more streamlined, more manageable. It was a transformation, subtle but deliberate.
To this day, my family still calls me by my original name, as if clinging to an earlier version of me. But I was done with that identity. Somewhere deep inside my five-year-old brain, I realized the girl I’d been before who didn’t like to play in the sand and get my hands dirty wasn’t built for what life was throwing at me. So, I remade myself into someone stronger. Someone tougher. Someone capable of taking the punch and could keep moving.
That was my first real lesson in resilience. It took me years to understand what I was doing back then. But it set the stage for a life shaped by bounce-backs, reinventions, and more than a little grit.
