If you've endured these 10 experiences and made it through, you're more resilient than 95% of people

A few years back, I was sitting in a Venice Beach coffee shop, nursing an oat milk latte and watching a woman across from me absolutely lose it on a phone call. Her business had fallen through. Her partner had left. Everything was crashing down at once.

Fast forward six months, and I spotted her again at the same coffee shop, laughing with friends, looking lighter somehow. Not like nothing had happened, but like she'd survived something and came out different on the other side.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity with flexibility and strength, but here's what most articles won't tell you: it's not about being unbreakable. It's about being broken and choosing to keep going anyway.

If you've made it through these experiences, you've already proven you're tougher than most people will ever need to be.

1) You survived a major health crisis

Whether it was your body betraying you or watching someone you love fight for their life, health crises force us to confront our vulnerability while revealing our inner strength.

I watched my grandmother go through cancer treatment while still showing up to volunteer at the food bank every Saturday she was physically able. That kind of determination doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from deciding that the crisis doesn't get to write your whole story.

Health challenges strip away everything superficial. They teach you what actually matters and who actually shows up. And if you've been through that and you're still here? You know something about endurance that can't be taught in a classroom.

2) You lost someone you couldn't imagine living without

Grief is the price we pay for love, and it's a bill that never stops coming.

When you lose someone central to your existence, the world doesn't pause. Bills still arrive. Work still demands your attention. Life keeps moving while you're trying to remember how to breathe.

But here's what that teaches you: you can hold unbearable pain and still function. You can miss someone every single day and still build a life worth living. By facing your grief and acknowledging your losses, you're able to heal and eventually move forward.

The people who've survived this know that healing doesn't mean forgetting. It means learning to carry the weight differently.

3) You rebuilt your life after a relationship ended

There's losing someone to death, and then there's the strange grief of someone choosing to walk away.

I've been with my partner for five years now, but I remember the relationship before this one. The one where I thought I'd found my person, and then I hadn't. The apartment that felt too big. The routines that suddenly made no sense.

Rebuilding after that kind of loss means relearning who you are when you're not part of a "we" anymore. It means filling the silence with new habits, new friends, new versions of yourself you didn't know existed.

If you've done that, you've already proven you don't need someone else to be whole. You just needed time to remember.

4) You navigated a career collapse

Career setbacks force you into unfamiliar territory and push you to reevaluate your path. They're especially brutal because they often come wrapped in shame.

I transitioned from music blogging to lifestyle writing because the industry changed underneath me. What felt like a failure at the time turned out to be the thing that led me to work I actually care about. But I didn't know that while it was happening.

In the moment, career loss feels like identity loss. Your email signature changes. Your daily routine evaporates. You have to figure out what you're worth when the market says you're not worth what you used to be.

People who survive this learn something crucial: your job is not your value. Your ability to adapt is.

5) You recovered from addiction or watched someone you love try

Whether it was your battle or someone else's, addiction is one of the most misunderstood tests of resilience out there.

The daily choice to not give in. The constant renegotiation with your own brain. The relapses that feel like failure but are actually just part of the process. This experience teaches you that willpower isn't enough and that asking for help isn't weakness.

Social connections help individuals cope with stress, provide emotional support, and promote a sense of belonging. Anyone who's been through recovery knows this isn't about being strong. It's about being honest.

6) You survived financial devastation

Money problems are uniquely invasive. They affect where you live, what you eat, how you move through the world. They create a constant background hum of anxiety that makes everything else harder.

But living through financial crisis teaches you what you can actually live without. It strips away the illusion that security comes from a bank balance. It shows you which relationships survive when you can't pick up the check.

And if you climbed out of that hole? You know something about persistence that people who've never had to count pennies for groceries will never understand.

7) You left a toxic environment you were told you couldn't survive without

Maybe it was a job. Maybe it was a relationship. Maybe it was a family dynamic that had defined you for decades.

Stepping out of your comfort zone involves taking risks and potentially facing failure or rejection, but leaving something toxic requires a special kind of courage because you're not moving toward opportunity. You're moving away from harm, which means the landing might hurt.

I've seen friends leave careers that looked perfect from the outside because they were dying on the inside. I've watched my partner navigate family situations that would have crushed most people. The resilience isn't in the leaving. It's in believing you deserve better when everyone around you is saying you should be grateful for what you have.

8) You've been the person everyone else leaned on

There's a specific exhaustion that comes from being the strong one. The reliable one. The person who holds it together when everything falls apart.

I learned this watching my grandmother, who raised four kids on a teacher's salary and still had energy left over for everyone else's emergencies. She once drove six hours to bring me soup when I had the flu in college. That's the person everyone calls. And it's lonely in a way that's hard to explain.

Connecting with friends and family helps ease stress and boost your mood during tough times, but what happens when you're always the connection point and never the one being held up?

If you've carried that weight, you've developed resilience the hard way. You've learned to refill your own cup because no one else was watching the gauge.

9) You failed spectacularly and publicly

Private failure is hard enough. Public failure adds a layer of humiliation that makes everything worse.

Starting out as a music blogger in the 2000s Los Angeles scene, I had my share of takes that aged terribly. Reviews that completely missed the point. Predictions about bands that were embarrassingly wrong. All of it archived online forever.

Personal failures teach us that failure is not a death sentence but a stepping stone toward growth. They force you to separate who you are from what you did. They teach you that embarrassment is temporary but regret over not trying lasts forever.

The people who bounce back from public failure learn something essential: other people's memory of your mistake is much shorter than yours. And their opinion matters much less than you think it does.

10) You found yourself completely alone in a crisis

Not alone in the sense of being single or living by yourself. Alone in the sense of realizing that in your darkest moment, there was no cavalry coming. No one who could fix it for you. Just you and the mess you were in.

Resilience is the hidden inner reservoir of strength revealed during life's most trying times. This experience is the ultimate test because it strips away all the backup plans. It forces you to discover what you're capable of when there's no safety net.

I've had moments like this. Sitting in my Venice Beach apartment at 3am, facing a problem I couldn't solve, with no one to call who could make it better. Those are the nights that teach you who you actually are.

If you've been there and you're reading this now, you already know: you're stronger than you thought. You can survive things you were certain would break you.

Conclusion

Look, resilience isn't a badge of honor. It's not something you should have to earn. In an ideal world, none of us would go through these experiences.

But we don't live in an ideal world. We live in this one, where hard things happen and we have to figure out how to keep going anyway.

If you've survived even a few of these experiences, you've already built something that most people never need to develop. That's not a reason to be proud, exactly. But it's definitely a reason to be kinder to yourself about how far you've come.

The resilience is already there. You proved it by making it through.