If You've Experienced These 8 Things, You're More Resilient Than 98% Of People
Proof you’re more resilient than almost anyone you know.
Dean Drobot / Shutterstock Some people go through life with relatively smooth sailing, while others get hit with storm after storm, yet keep standing. Resilience isn’t about being invincible or unfazed. It’s about how you show up after everything tries to knock you down. If you’ve endured and found your way through, even if it wasn’t pretty, you carry a quiet strength most people will never fully understand.
It’s about more than surviving major traumas. Resilience is about the way you hold yourself together when life feels unfair or when you have no one to lean on. It’s the way you adapt, rebuild, and keep going when everything in you wants to shut down.
If you've experienced these 8 things, you're more resilient than 98% of people
1. You’ve had to start over from nothing
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Losing everything, whether it was a job, a home, a relationship, or a sense of stability, isn’t something you forget. Starting over forces you to rebuild your life and your identity. It’s terrifying, humbling, and exhausting.
Yet, if you’ve done it, you know how much strength it takes to begin again when you’re still grieving what you lost. Not everyone has the courage to face the unknown like that, but you did.
2. You’ve been betrayed by someone you deeply trusted
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Nothing rattles your sense of safety quite like betrayal by someone you let all the way in. It’s a kind of pain that makes you question your judgment, your worth, and sometimes even your reality. Healing means learning to trust yourself again.
If you’ve come out the other side, wiser but still open-hearted, you’ve done something most people never figure out how to do.
3. You’ve watched a dream fall apart
When something you worked hard for falls through, it’s more than disappointment. It can feel like a loss of identity. Whether it was a career path, a big move, or a creative pursuit, watching a dream die takes a special kind of grief.
If you didn’t give up on dreaming altogether, if you dared to dream again or find purpose in something new, you’ve shown more emotional grit than most people realize.
4. You’ve been through a period of deep loneliness
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Not just alone, but that aching kind of loneliness where it feels like no one sees or gets you. Many people fill that void with noise or distraction. But if you’ve sat in that space and learned how to befriend yourself, even a little, you’ve developed an inner resilience that’s incredibly rare.
It takes real emotional maturity to find peace in your own company when it would be easier to run from it.
5. You’ve had to be the strong one for everyone else
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Whether you wanted to or not, you became the emotional anchor in your family, your relationships, or your workplace. Being the one who has it together all the time is often a quiet burden.
If you’ve held space for others, made sacrifices, or hidden your pain so others could feel safe, you’ve built a kind of strength that’s as selfless as it is unrecognized.
6. You’ve had to make a life-altering decision alone
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When there’s no right answer, no clear path, and no one to guide you, but you have to choose anyway. Whether it involved your health, your family, or your future, making a major decision with real consequences and carrying that weight alone is something only resilient people know how to do.
It sharpens your instincts, deepens your confidence, and shows you that you can handle more than you ever thought possible.
7. You’ve faced a long, unseen struggle
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Chronic illness. Ongoing anxiety. A years-long battle with something most people can’t see. If you’ve shown up for your life every day while carrying a pain others don’t notice or understand, your strength runs deeper than most people will ever know.
Silent endurance doesn’t get much applause, but it builds a level of quiet resilience that’s nothing short of extraordinary.
8. You’ve had to let go of someone you still loved
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Whether through distance, circumstance, or death, choosing to let go when your heart still wants to hold on is one of the hardest things anyone can do.
That kind of love-stained loss stays with you. But if you’ve found a way to honor it without letting it break you, if you’ve allowed yourself to keep loving without shutting down, that’s true strength. Few people know how to move forward with that kind of grace.
Sloane Bradshaw is a writer and essayist who frequently contributes to YourTango.
