This week, my sixth graders started the Cultivating Resilience unit. Last year, I called it “Bouncing Back”—because that’s what I thought resilience was. A rubber band stretching and snapping back to its original shape. A setback followed by a return to normal.

I’ve since learned that sometimes you don’t bounce at all. Sometimes the shape you were doesn’t exist anymore. And maybe that’s the point.

In my graduate coursework for gifted education, I’ve been studying Kazimierz Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. It’s a mouthful, but the premise is startlingly simple: psychological growth doesn’t happen through stability. It happens through falling apart.

Dabrowski argued that intense negative emotions—anxiety, despair, the feeling that your life as you knew it is crumbling—aren’t signs of weakness. They’re the raw material for transformation. The disintegration is the development. You can’t rebuild at a higher level until the old structure comes down.

But here’s what Dabrowski didn’t say that I know to be true: I’m not the architect of the rebuild. God is.

What feels like falling apart is really being taken apart—by hands far more skilled than mine. The Potter doesn’t consult the clay. He breaks what needs breaking and reshapes what remains. And His mercies are new every morning.

Last March, I wrote about chasing sunrises at Yorktown Beach and what they taught me about resilience. I thought I understood it then. I wrote about the clouds that hid the sun on St. Patrick’s Day, about Mama Marci learning to wake up without her son, about how “some progress is better marked in years than sunrises.”

I didn’t know I was writing a letter to my future self.

Tonight, the shoreline looks different than it did when I wrote those words. The people beside me have changed. The prayers have changed. Roles I thought defined me have fallen away, and I’m standing in the rubble wondering who remains.

But I’m not standing alone. I never was.

Resilience isn’t returning to who you were. It’s not a rubber band. It’s not even “bouncing back.” Resilience is advancing despite adversity—becoming who God is shaping you to be because who you were is no longer an option.

The night has to fully end before the dawn begins. The old structure has to disintegrate before a stronger one can rise. And the One who ordained the sunrise has ordained every next step, even the ones I can’t yet see.

I don’t know what shape I’m becoming. I only know the old one is gone—and that the hands holding me are good.

The heron doesn’t know my name. The tide doesn’t ask permission. And the sun will rise tomorrow because He commanded it so.

Know I’ll show up again. Afraid. Uncertain and human.

And held.