When I was a young whipper-snapper, I would run around wearing nothing but cutoffs. No shoes, no shirt, just Jason and his trusty pair of jean shorts with no hem, leaving the dangly bits you see on the newfangled “torn” look jeans. I was a trendsetter.

Being a kid, you can probably guess that things didn’t always go well. Running around on pavement left me open to many a skinned knee, road rash burn, and other scrapes and injuries. I used to love riding my Green Machine down the alley where I lived. For those who have never experienced this wonderful deathtrap, the coolest thing about it was being able to pull one lever hard enough to kick the back end around and slide, or even do a short version of drifting, while still moving pretty fast.

One day, I was zooming down the hill and decided to try the slide maneuver at exactly the wrong time. I hit a rock, which sent me rolling into a row of our neighbor’s rose bushes. Remember, I was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts.

My mother had no idea what had just happened. She suddenly looked up to see our neighbor walking a bloody youngster up the back walkway, bawling his eyes out and dripping blood everywhere, probably wondering what the hell had just occurred. It looked like I had been assaulted by a thousand insects carrying a thousand razor blades. Mom took me into the house and proceeded to clean me up with alcohol and what had once been a white washcloth. I’m pretty sure the washcloth never recovered.

I did, though.

That’s one of the things I find interesting about kids. They can get absolutely destroyed by something one minute and be ready to go back outside the next. They fall down, cry, get cleaned up, and eventually find their way back to whatever they were doing before they got hurt. Kids seem to have an almost instinctive ability to bend under pressure without breaking.

That’s resilience.

Of course, I don’t think resilience means that we simply bounce back without being affected by what happened. The scars from some injuries remain long after the pain is gone. Some are visible, and some aren’t. What changes as we get older is how complicated getting back up becomes.

As a kid, I crashed a Green Machine into a rose bush, got cleaned up, and eventually went back outside.

As an adult, we tend to do things a little differently. We fall down and immediately start asking why. We replay what happened, wonder what we could have done differently, blame ourselves, blame someone else, blame circumstances, or sometimes blame all three. We worry about whether it will happen again and wonder if we can trust the ground beneath us anymore.

Sometimes we spend so much time trying to understand the fall that we forget we’re still capable of getting back up.

Losing Melanee wasn’t a skinned knee. There was no bandage, no alcohol wipe, and no amount of time that was going to put things back exactly the way they were. Losing her changed the landscape of my life in ways I am still discovering. There were days when simply getting through the day felt like an accomplishment. There were moments when something completely ordinary could knock me back to the ground—a song, a memory, the emptiness of the other side of the bed, or something I wanted to tell her before remembering that I couldn’t.

Those were my aftershocks. And yet, somehow, I’m still here.

I’ve started to realize that resilience isn’t about pretending the earthquake never happened. It isn’t about forgetting the person you lost, ignoring the pain, or returning to the person you were before everything changed. It’s about accepting that something happened that cannot be undone and then deciding what you’re going to do with what remains.

Some things need to be repaired. Some things need to be rebuilt. Some things need to be left behind, while other things become part of you. I’ve also learned that resilience doesn’t mean doing everything alone. Sometimes getting back up means accepting a hand when someone offers one. Sometimes it means letting family help. Sometimes it means listening when someone tells you that you’re not seeing something clearly. And sometimes it means allowing someone new into your life who understands that you have a past and doesn’t expect you to erase it.

The kid who went flying into the rose bushes didn’t know anything about resilience. He just knew he wanted to get back on his Green Machine. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along. I get knocked down, I get cleaned up, I look at the damage, I figure out what still works, and eventually I get back up.

I don’t think resilience means that we don’t break. Sometimes we do. Sometimes life breaks things inside us that take a very long time to put back together. Maybe resilience is simply the willingness to keep rebuilding, even when the ground doesn’t feel the same anymore.

The scars may never completely disappear. The life we had may not be the life we have now. But there is still life. There is still love. There is still the possibility of something good ahead, and there is still a road to travel.

Maybe I’m still that kid, just with a few more scars.