Resilience Is the Reset

This is part 4 of 5. Read Part one here  |  Read Part two here | Read Part three here

It’s been a heavy week.

Australia.
Brown University.
A home in California was terrorized for placing a menorah in the window.

And the senseless murder of Michelle and Rob Reiner. People I knew during those early parenting years, when everything felt innocent and possible.

Some weeks, the world presses down so hard that moving through it feels like wading through water. This week, my body has felt it all: low energy, a quiet mind, and everything in slow motion.

And still, tonight is the fifth night of Hanukkah.

We are closing out the month of Kislev, the month that holds the tension between darkness and light. Hanukkah teaches us that a single flame can push back a vast night. But if I’m honest, there are moments when holding that flame feels almost impossible.

Yet Kislev rolls into Tevet on December 21, and Tevet is a month of resilience.

Not loud resilience.
Not performative strength.
Not “keep going no matter what.”

Tevet invites a different kind of resilience,  the kind that asks us to sit in the ruins long enough to understand what they’re trying to say.

This year has been exactly that for me:
A curriculum in listening beneath the noise.

For months after the fire, I was in shock. And then, slowly, the mourning began. Something shifted in early summer, when the shock softened, and my spiritual awakening cracked open. I found myself reflecting on truths I had avoided for decades:

The truth of who my mother was.
The truth of who my sibling is.
The truth of who I became in response.

And most surprising, the truth about Mitch, that the love I thought I had outgrown was actually the love that saved me.

I don’t share these truths to give my past agency.
I share them because they illuminate something universal:

Resilience begins where illusion ends.

Resilience isn’t about toughness.
It’s not about pushing through.
It’s not about pretending we’re unaffected.

Resilience is the reset.

It’s the space between who we were and who we are becoming.
It’s the quiet decision to see clearly, even when the truth is uncomfortable.
It’s the willingness to unbury ourselves.

And I've carried that resilience longer than I ever realized.

When I was twelve, I spent nineteen days in the hospital.
Collapsed lungs. Tubes. Needles. Fear.

I remember the oppressive heat, a summer heat wave inside a hospital with no air conditioning. The original Cedars of Lebanon felt like an oven. I remember drawing under the oxygen tent, creating crossword puzzles and word searches, each letter neatly formed because order was the only thing I could control.

But what I remember most is how everything changed when my dad walked into the room.

He was the warm blanket.
Honesty, humor, humility.
Light, even when I didn’t know how to look for it.

What I also remember is this:
I didn’t panic.
I didn’t rage.
I chose, instinctively, to hold on.

At twelve years old, I learned how to survive without even understanding the word.

That same girl still lives inside me.
She’s the one who got me through cancer.
Through family dynamics that cut deep.
Through the fire.
Through endings I didn’t see coming.
Through beginnings, I didn’t know I was allowed to claim.

This year, resilience has looked like:

✨ Telling the truth about my marriage and choosing it again.
✨ Releasing the fantasy that my mother or sibling would ever become who I needed.
✨ Recognizing familiar patterns in new faces, and stepping away before they take root.
✨ Admitting when something I was passionate about was no longer aligned.
✨ Trusting the pause instead of forcing the momentum.

Yes, the fire took everything.

But resilience is what allowed me to see what it gave me.

And through all of this darkness, the LIGHT remains:

• Mitch.
• My boys (and my growing family).
• The fresh perspective of relocation.
• Safety.
• Freedom.
• My Jewish community, a fortress of connection and meaning.
• And this growing, unexpected circle of you reading, witnessing, walking with me.

People often ask how I’m so resilient after everything I’ve lived through:
three cancer diagnoses, the fire, and the losses that reshaped my life.

But the truth is: we are all resilient.

You don’t know your strength until life requires you to reach for it.
You don’t recognize your light until you’re forced to carry it into darkness.
And you don’t understand your power until something compels you to claim it.

As we enter Tevet, I’m holding this close:

What does your resilience want to reset?

With love, reflection, and the smallest flame that somehow keeps glowing,
Susan

P.S. This is part 4 of 5. Read Part one here

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