Resilience and Reinvention

There are moments in life when the ground beneath you gives way, when all the plans you’ve carefully made scatter like sand in the wind. For me, that moment came in 2024. Within a few short months, I was diagnosed with advanced cancer, my beloved son Javier took his life, and I found myself stepping away from a headship position I had dreamed of for decades. I thought I knew resilience. As a single mother who raised two children while building a career, as someone who has endured divorce, as a Latina navigating predominantly white spaces, I thought I understood what it meant to survive. But this cascade of losses brought me to my knees. Resilience, I realized, is not about standing tall and unshaken in the storm. It is about letting yourself crumble, and then choosing—sometimes slowly, sometimes painfully—to gather the broken pieces and begin again.

The Myth of “Bouncing Back”

We often talk about resilience as if it were a springboard: you hit bottom, and then you bounce right back up. But real resilience is quieter, slower, and far less linear. It’s about surrender—about admitting that life has changed, that you cannot go back, and that survival will demand a reinvention of self. When I returned to work after surgery, I wanted to believe I could simply pick up where I had left off. But my body told the truth: I was not the same. The strength and stamina I once had were gone. My mind felt foggy, and the work I had once loved now felt impossibly heavy. At first, I grieved this loss of ability almost as much as I grieved my son. To walk away from a role I had prepared for all my life felt like a kind of death, too. But in that surrender—painful as it was—I began to glimpse another truth: reinvention is not failure. It is an opening.

The Work of Reinvention

Reinvention begins with a question: Who am I now? This question is not easy to answer when everything familiar has been stripped away. But loss—whether of a person, a dream, a job, or a former self—always invites us to redefine what it means to live with purpose. I am no longer the head of an institution. I am no longer the mother of two children in the same way I once was. I am no longer the strong, tireless woman who could push through anything. And yet, I am still me—still a leader, still a mother, still a woman capable of meaning and beauty. Reinvention has meant finding new ways to express those parts of myself. I write. I paint. I think deeply about leadership—not from behind the desk of a head of school, but from the quiet of my home, where I am learning how to live and lead courageously in a different way.

Living Bravely

Resilience and reinvention are not destinations. They are practices, renewed each day. They require courage—the courage to tell the truth about what hurts, the courage to step into the unknown, the courage to imagine that even in brokenness, beauty is possible. I have come to believe that resilience is less about being unbreakable and more about being willing to be broken, and to keep living anyway. Reinvention asks us to release the story of the life we thought we would have, and to discover the life that is asking to be lived now. For me, that means embracing creativity, connection, and storytelling. It means trusting that my leadership does not vanish just because I am no longer leading an institution. It transforms. It expands. It takes on new forms. And it means remembering that courage is not the absence of fear or pain. Courage is simply the decision to keep going, even when the way forward is uncertain.

An Invitation

Perhaps you, too, are standing in the rubble of a life you didn’t choose. Perhaps you are wondering what resilience looks like when the old definitions no longer fit. My invitation is this: Do not rush to rebuild the old life. Instead, listen for the life that is waiting to be created. Reinvention begins there—in the quiet, in the surrender, in the willingness to imagine something new. Together, we can practice resilience not as “bouncing back,” but as the slow, courageous work of becoming.

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