Are You the Hero or Victim of Your Story?

I was forty days old when I attended my first demonstration, in my mother's arms. The Iranian regime used tear gas. A fourteen-year-old boy was shot dead. My mother wore a veil herself but marched against the mandatory hijab, for other women's right to choose. That is the first thing I know about myself: that I come from a woman who was prepared to die for a principle she did not even personally need.

A few years later, I died in the snow. My family was crossing the Kurdish mountains, fleeing Iran. My parents were political dissidents. My mother smuggled weapons with me as cover, cyanide capsules under her tongue in case we were captured. I developed hypothermia. My breathing stopped. My heart stopped. Kurdish village women revived me using knowledge older than any medical textbook.

That is where my relationship with resilience begins, not as a concept, but as a lived reality.

Trauma is not your identity

I have been a refugee, a target of an assassination plot organized by the Iranian embassy, and a woman building a career in rooms where no one expected me to be. Not once did I hear the women who fought against the mullahs in Iran, alongside my mother, call themselves victims. They had been tortured, lost family, survived the unimaginable — and they kept fighting, with a smile and a fire in their eyes that lit the way forward.

As a neuroscientist, I study why some people break under pressure while others transform. Science has a name for it: post-traumatic growth. Trauma does not have to define you. It can become fuel — but only if you choose it. That choice is not passive. It demands action, discipline, and a refusal to let your worst experience become your identity.

The hero never plays the victim

I believe in a principle I have carried since childhood: the victim focuses on what has been. The hero fights in the present and looks ahead. This is not about denying injustice — injustice is real. Trauma and the pain that comes with it is real. It is about refusing to let it have the final word.

Does it require you to work twice as hard as the person next to you? Work twice as hard. Are you both a woman and an immigrant? Work three times as hard, or whatever it takes to get where you want to go. Beat them. Not by talking. By doing. Study, study, study. Acquire knowledge and power. Be results-oriented, look forward, roll up your sleeves, and fight.

I never want to be chosen because I am a woman or an immigrant. I want to be chosen on merit. People who constantly emphasize their disadvantages end up reinforcing the very power structures they set out to dismantle. The victim role paralyzes. Diminishes. Weakens. That is why it holds no interest for me.

What resilience actually looks like

Resilience is not a personality trait you are born with. It is a practice you build. The neuroscience is clear: the brain responds to adversity not with a fixed reaction but with a pattern shaped by prior experience, social support, and narrative. The story you tell yourself about what happened to you is not a minor detail. It is the mechanism through which your brain decides whether the experience will break you or build you.

This is why I speak about resilience not from a self-help stage but from a neuroscience lab and a boardroom. The principles are the same whether you are recovering from childhood trauma, navigating a failed business, or leading a team through crisis: protect your attention, control your narrative, invest in the relationships that restore you, and never confuse comfort with safety.

Resisto ergo sum — I resist, therefore I am

Descartes wrote: cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. I have always felt that formulation was incomplete. Thinking is passive. It is what happens in a chair. The women who shaped me did not sit and think their way to freedom. They stood up and fought for it.

My modification: resisto ergo sum. I resist, therefore I am.

Resistance is not anger. It is not reaction. It is the deliberate decision to refuse the limits that others — or circumstances — try to impose on you. It is my grandmother, who was illiterate but fought with her bare hands to build a future for her family so that my brother could become the youngest associate professor in Swedish history. It is my mother, who marched with tear gas in her lungs and cyanide under her tongue, but refused to give up the fight for freedom in Iran. It is every person who has looked at the world they were given and said: this is not the world I will accept.

If you are reading this and you recognize that feeling — the refusal, the fire, the quiet stubbornness that will not let you settle — then you already know what resilience is. You do not need a lecture. You have it. Use it.