Stories of Resilience: Why I Am Drawn to Narratives of Survival and Reinvention

Every story I am drawn to, whether as a reader or a writer, seems to orbit the same core idea:
How do we keep going when the life we imagined collapses?
How do we survive ourselves — and the families, histories, and losses that shaped us?

It is easy to romanticize survival. To frame it as grit or determination, a series of heroic moments. But the kind of survival that interests me is not clean or cinematic. It is messy. It is stubborn. It is made up of choices that do not always look heroic from the outside — only necessary.

In Ocean Child, Julia, Miriam, and Catrina each face moments where their lives could split apart permanently.

• Julia confronts a truth about her father that shakes the foundation of everything she has accepted as reality.

• Miriam spirals under the pressure of public success and private grief until she is barely holding herself together.

• Catrina chases ambition so fiercely that she risks losing herself in the process.

None of them have easy solutions. None of them change overnight. Their survival is not a moment of triumph. It is a daily act of choosing: to stay, to fight, to rebuild something better from broken beginnings.

That is what draws me to stories of resilience. Not the moment when everything gets fixed, but the long, uneven climb toward something new. The mistakes made along the way. The small, private victories that no one else sees. The choice to hope, not because there is proof it will work out, but because giving up costs even more.

I believe survival is one of the most deeply human stories we can tell. It is a story we all live, in ways big and small, every day. Ocean Child is my attempt to honor that daily bravery.