resilience

RESILIENCE IS A BOOMERANG

Resilience.
It is one of those words we nod at, but rarely stop to taste. It comes from the Latin resilire — to leap back, to rebound. But resilience is not simply about bouncing back, untouched and unchanged. It is the art of returning different. Resilience is a boomerang. You throw it into the world- into chaos, into storms, into expectations. It flies in ways you don’t predict. But when it returns, it carries the weight of distance, the force of wind, and the imprint of the journey.

I grew up as a middle child in an Indian family, raised in a home that was both religious and progressive. My parents believed in women’s rights and gave me freedom even when the world outside did not. As a child, I was raised like a boy after my older sister. I scraped knees climbing walls, played cricket in the street, and screamed until my lungs ached when someone cheated. No one kissed my wounds better. I learned to man up, to swallow the pain, and to keep playing. But then came puberty. Society decided girls no longer belonged with boys, and my parents- once my shield- began to echo that judgment. That was my first fracture. My first storm. And yet, resilience is what happens when identity shatters and you choose to keep standing. I became too loud, too bold, too much. They called me a firecracker. But resilience doesn’t apologize for being too much- it ignites.

At 27, I began traveling the world alone. Sometimes my parents didn’t even know what country I was in, and yet they trusted me enough to go. Each trip was a throw of the boomerang: unpredictable winds, unfamiliar lands, but always a return. Travel taught me that resilience is not built in comfort zones. It is shaped in airports where no one knows your name, in mistakes made in foreign tongues, in the courage to adapt when the map is wrong. Through it all, I carried my roots. Raised religious, I prayed every morning, though over time my faith bent toward deeper spirituality. The first lesson I learned on that path was to strip away ego. My first true ego-death came through psychedelics- terrifying and liberating, the dissolution of the self I thought I was. And yet what remained was indestructible. That, too, was resilience: discovering that even when the self dies, the soul rebounds.

I once learned this truth: A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what it is made for. Resilience is not calm waters. It is not staying safe in the dock. It is the courage to sail into storms, to know what parts of you will hold and what parts must be stripped away. If you do not know your cracks, the storm will teach you. True resilience is self-discovery in motion. It is the ability to take criticism, to laugh at yourself, to stare into the storm and say: Come on. Test me.

And so I return to the boomerang. No matter how far it travels, if thrown with intention, it circles back. Spiritually, resilience is the same: the energy you release — whether love, effort, faith, or endurance — always returns, often magnified. Karma is the throw and dharma, your higher purpose, is the hand releasing it. Every setback, every collapse, is a cycle of death and rebirth — echoing Hinduism, Buddhism, and Indigenous wisdom. Life itself is a series of returns: you fall, you rise, you fall again, and each time resilience pulls you back stronger. Even when heartbreak, injustice, or despair drags you far from yourself, resilience is the gravity that draws you home. It whispers through the storm: You are never truly lost. You will always return to yourself.

Here is what resilience has taught me: you will lose yourself in the process. You will shed illusions, identities, and borrowed masks. You will abandon parts of yourself just to survive. But like a boomerang, you will return. Not as you left, but as someone sharpened by winds, forged by distance, carried back by forces greater than yourself.

Resilience is not just the rebound. It is the rebirth.

So I ask you- when life throws you out into storms and fractures, how will you return? Because resilience is not about surviving unchanged. It is about becoming someone the storm could not take. Like a boomerang, you are meant to come back- stronger, truer, and more whole than when you left.