Resilience: The long journey home

Resilience is not just survival. It is not just enduring. It is not just standing upright beneath a weight that should have crushed me.

For years, I thought resilience meant suppressing my pain, swallowing my shame, and moving forward without flinching. I thought it meant being strong enough to endure rejection, failure, and loss without breaking. But I have learned that true resilience is not about how much I can bear—it is about how much I can release.

I have carried so much shame.

The shame of rejection. Of not being chosen. Of waiting for someone to come good, only to be met with silence. The shame of being a puppet in someone else’s game, of being used, discarded, and dismissed when I sought answers, when I demanded reparations.

The shame of being too introverted for the role I was expected to play. Of feeling alien in an environment that assaulted my senses. The shame of longing for beauty in a world that expected me to accept filth. The shame of exhaustion, of needing rest when I was told to push through. The shame of being let down by friends, of realizing they would not—could not—fight for me the way I had fought for them.

And worst of all, the shame of feeling like even God had turned His back on me.

I came home broken—physically, emotionally, spiritually. And the voices of the faithful told me it was my own fault. “Oh ye of little faith,” they said, as though faith alone should have been enough to keep me from collapsing under the weight of it all.

And so I carried even more shame.

But resilience is about unlearning that shame. It is about seeing the truth: that I was not weak, only human. That I was not unworthy, only wounded. That I did not fail—I survived.

Trauma does not just leave bruises on the heart; it seeps into the mind, into the very way I see the world. It left me paralyzed, unable to make plans, unable to picture a future. It taught me that hope was dangerous, that expectations only led to disappointment. And in the moments I needed connection the most, it kept me locked in silence.

I see it now.

I see how I lashed out in my own pain when silence was all I received in return. I see how I longed for certainty, for clarity, for direction, while someone else was frozen in fear, unable to answer the questions I so desperately needed resolved. I see how trauma response was meeting trauma response, and we only ever hurt each other more.

And now I lay it down.

The shame. The guilt. The need for answers. The desire for reparations that will never come.

I do not need their apology to heal. I do not need their recognition to be whole. I do not need permission to exist fully, freely, without shame.

Resilience is about creating a home in myself where I am not judged, abandoned, or rejected. It is about carrying that home with me so I am no longer at anyone else’s mercy. And in that home, I have found that God was never the one who turned away from me.

I had mistaken the cruelty of people for the absence of God. I had let the failures of churches convince me that He had failed me too. But He was always there—in the quiet, in the stillness, in the moments I thought I was alone.

God is not a church. He is not a system. He is not an institution that protects its own at the expense of the wounded. He is not the voices that dismissed me. He is not the ones who looked the other way.

He is the quiet whisper in my heart. He is the one who saw every injustice, every betrayal, every tear. And He is the one who is still calling me—not to penance, not to suffering, not to proving my worth, but to freedom.

I am not what happened to me.

I am not the rejection. I am not the silence. I am not the failures of others to see my worth.

I am here.

I am healing.

I am whole.

And I was always, always loved.