Resilience as Feeling, Falling, and Continuing
Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fail, you hurt. You fall. But, you keep going. — Yasmin Mogahed
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
Where does this idea show up in your life right now?
Redefining Resilience Beyond Toughness
Yasmin Mogahed reframes resilience as something more human than heroic: it isn’t a polished image of strength, but a willingness to remain in contact with life as it really is. Instead of implying that resilient people are unshaken, her words suggest the opposite—that being shaken is part of the process. From that starting point, resilience becomes less about looking unbreakable and more about refusing to opt out of living when things become painful. In other words, endurance is not the absence of difficulty; it’s the decision to stay present through it.
Experience and Feeling as the First Steps
She begins with “you experience, you feel,” placing emotion at the center rather than treating it as a detour. That ordering matters: resilience is grounded in acknowledging reality—what happened—and letting yourself register its impact. This aligns with the psychological idea that emotional suppression can intensify distress over time, whereas naming and processing feelings often supports recovery. Building on this, Mogahed implies that numbness is not a prerequisite for progress. The resilient person is not the one who feels least, but the one who can feel fully and still move forward.
Failure as Evidence of Participation
When she says “you fail,” she normalizes failure as a sign that you are engaged in something meaningful enough to risk loss. In this view, failure is not a verdict on your worth but a byproduct of trying—an inevitable companion to ambition, learning, and change. This perspective echoes Samuel Beckett’s often-quoted line from *Worstward Ho* (1983): “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The continuity between the two is the shift from shame to iteration—failure becomes information, not identity.
Hurt and Falling Without Self-Abandonment
Mogahed doesn’t rush past pain: “you hurt. You fall.” The sequence suggests that setbacks are not only external events but internal experiences—disappointment, grief, embarrassment, exhaustion. By stating them plainly, she removes the illusion that resilience looks graceful. Yet the deeper point is that falling doesn’t require self-erasure. You can be wounded without concluding you are ruined; you can be down without deciding you are done. Her phrasing makes space for vulnerability while quietly refusing to let it become the final chapter.
The Core Promise: Keep Going
The concluding turn—“But, you keep going”—acts like a hinge that transforms suffering into motion. “But” doesn’t deny what came before; it carries it forward. Resilience, then, is continuity: returning to your values, responsibilities, or hopes even when your emotional state is heavy. In everyday life, this may look small: getting out of bed after a hard night, sending the application after a rejection, apologizing after a mistake, or taking one walk when motivation is gone. The act is modest, but its meaning is profound—persistence becomes a form of self-respect.
A Practical Ethic of Compassionate Persistence
Because her definition includes feeling and hurting, it implicitly invites compassion—toward yourself and others. If resilience requires going through pain rather than bypassing it, then people who struggle are not failing at life; they are living it. That realization can soften judgment and reduce the loneliness that often follows setbacks. Ultimately, Mogahed offers an ethic: accept the full range of human experience, allow it to shape you, and still choose forward movement. Resilience becomes not a trait you either have or don’t, but a practice you return to—again and again—especially when you’d rather stop.