By Sheree Johnson
I was scrolling TikTok the other day when I came across a New York Times piece about Cuba. Six months into the fuel crisis brought on by the Trump administration’s oil blockade, and Cubans are doing what people do when the ground shifts beneath them — enduring, improvising, inventing their way through it. Trading cars for bicycles. Switching trades. Rigging up solar panels on the sidewalk to charge what needs charging. Making a way where there isn’t one.
One man’s words stopped me mid-scroll. We don’t want to have to be resilient, he said, but we are. It’s the Cuban way.
I sat with that for a long moment, because I understood it in my bones.
There was a stretch of my life — one of the hardest I’ve lived through — when people kept telling me how strong I was. They meant it kindly. I hated it. I didn’t want to be strong. I didn’t want to have to be.
But here’s what I’ve come to see about that time. It didn’t just prove my resilience. It revealed something I hadn’t known about myself — that I was capable of far more than I’d ever been daring enough to try.
When there was no husband to ask to hang the photos on the wall, I hung them myself. When something broke and needed a tool and a steady hand, I picked up the tool. I did it. Small things, maybe, but they added up to a quiet, stubborn confidence: I can do hard things. I can figure it out. Every time I was left with no choice but to try, the list of what I was capable of got a little longer.
That, I think, is the part we miss when we talk about resilience. We treat it like endurance — like gritting your teeth and outlasting the storm. But real resilience is something more active than that. It’s ingenuity. It’s the improvising, the inventing, the finding of a way. It’s picking up a tool you’ve never held and figuring out how it works because the thing in front of you needs doing.
I’m in another one of those seasons now, and I’m meeting it the same way.
The challenge this time is a hard economy — the kind where people are piecing together two and three part-time jobs just to make ends meet. So I’m doing what I know how to do best: building. I’ve started a business of my own while I keep exploring opportunities, reaching out to companies and people I’ve worked with before, looking for where there’s something new to create together. When the usual path narrows, you cut a new one. That’s the work.
And here’s the tool I’m picking up this time: my own voice.
Sales was never my forte. For years I let my work speak for me — I leaned on my knowledge and my skills and trusted that they’d say enough. But this season is teaching me to speak for myself, out loud. To give the elevator speech. To make the pitch. To tell people plainly what I’m good at and why they’d want to build something with me. It’s a muscle I hadn’t trained, so I’m training it — the same way I once picked up a hammer, the same way those Cubans learned to wire a solar panel to the curb. You learn the tool the moment you need it.
And I have no doubt there will be other tools after this one. There always are. That’s not something I dread anymore. It’s something I’ve come to trust about myself.
Because somewhere in thinking about all of it — about Cuba, about that season years ago, about what resilience and ingenuity actually teach us — something settled in me. A quiet certainty that everything is going to be alright. Not because the challenges are small, but because I’ve learned what I’m made of. I’m the kind of person who finds a way. Who picks up the tool.
So I guess I really do want to be strong after all.
When have you surprised yourself by finding a way?
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