What’s your favorite word?

Resilience.

That’s my word. My favorite one.

Not because it’s cute or trendy or something I’d tattoo on my wrist (though maybe one day I will). It’s my word because it’s who I had to be to survive.

Resilience isn’t just “not giving up.” People throw that phrase around like it’s simple. But resilience is dragging yourself out of bed when your body feels like cement. It’s showing up for your kids when your world is falling apart. It’s screaming inside and still managing to whisper, I’m not done yet.

It’s refusing to stay down, no matter how many times life tries to bury you.

I think about the nights I sat in silence, wondering if I could keep going. When the weight of everything made it hard to breathe. And then—like clockwork—I’d hear my kids laugh from the other room. That laugh was enough to remind me: I still had fight left in me. That’s resilience.

And here’s the thing—once you really get resilience, once you live it, it doesn’t leave you. It becomes the lens you see life through. The good moments taste sweeter. The hard ones don’t feel impossible.

Resilience doesn’t mean I never broke. Trust me, I did. A million times. But every single time, I found a way to put myself back together. That’s why it’s my word. Because it’s me.