We’ve all heard the phrase before: “Just bounce back.”
It’s the advice we give after a setback, the expectation we carry after loss, the mantra we whisper to ourselves when life gets tough. The problem is we’re not rubber balls. We don’t just hit the ground and spring back to the way things were.
And honestly, we’re not supposed to.
After the storm that destroyed my home and the painful unraveling of other parts of my life, people would often tell me, “You’ll bounce back.” I know they meant it as encouragement. But every time I heard those words, something inside me sank. Because deep down, I knew the truth: I wasn’t going back. The old life was gone. The old me was gone.
And maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s transformation.
Why Bouncing Back Isn’t the Goal?
When we buy into the myth of bouncing back, we put impossible pressure on ourselves. We start to believe:
- That healing means forgetting.
- That resilience means pretending the pain never happened.
- That strength means looking like we’ve “moved on.”
But that’s not resilience. That’s denial.
True resilience doesn’t erase the wound. It acknowledges it.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that resilience isn’t about going back to normal. It’s about building something new.
Think about it: when a bone breaks and heals, the place where it mends is often stronger than before. It’s not the same bone it once was; it carries the mark of its injury. But it’s also been reinforced through the healing process. Also, when you break a bone, the first thing a doctor does is restrict it. They put it in a cast. That restriction isn’t punishment—it’s the path to healing.
In the same way, when life feels restrictive in seasons of grief or disruption, we often mistake it for setback. But maybe, just maybe, it’s God’s cast, His way of holding us still long enough for deep healing to take place.
Culturally, we tend to define strength as “getting over it” or “keeping it together.” But in my journey, strength looked very different.
Strength was admitting when I couldn’t carry the weight alone. Strength was allowing myself to cry, grieve, and pause. Strength was learning to pause and to ask for help. Strength was choosing faith not once, but daily, when I couldn’t see the outcome.
Resilience isn’t about looking invincible. It’s about being honest, vulnerable, and open to transformation.
Why This Shift Matters?
Here’s why rejecting the “bounce back” myth is so important: if you’re waiting to return to who you were before the crisis, you may miss who you’re becoming through it.
Your loss, your failure, your challenge, they don’t disqualify you. They shape you and deepen you. They create new capacities for empathy, wisdom, and strength.
The question isn’t, “When will I get back to normal?” The question is, “Who am I becoming now?”
If you’ve felt frustrated that you’re not “over it” yet, let me release you from that pressure: you don’t need to bounce back. You don’t need to return to the old version of yourself.
Instead, you can move forward into a new chapter, one marked not by pretending the fire never came, but by carrying the lessons it taught you. That’s what resilient hearts do.
Final Thought
I’ll never be the same person I was before my hardest year. And honestly, I don’t want to be. Because of the breaking, I discovered a deeper kind of strength, a quieter kind of faith, and a resilience that doesn’t deny reality but chooses to live fully in it.
Say it with me: I am not a rubber ball. I’m a resilient heart.
In my book, Resilient Hearts: Shaping Perspective, Embracing the Reframe, I talk about what it really means to live with resilience beyond the clichés and myths. If you’re tired of the pressure to “bounce back” and ready to move forward differently, this book was written for you.