Still Standing: Resilience, Reinvention & Rebuilding After Life Tries to Break You
- LoveliEsteem
- Jul 8
- 6 min read
Still Standing: Resilience, Reinvention & Rebuilding After Life Tries to Break You Featuring Nina J. Smith on Healing Through Conversations with Loveli Brown
Can I ask you something?
Have you ever survived something that nobody saw? Something that didn't make the highlight reel, didn't get a toast at dinner, didn't come with a congratulations card, because from the outside it just looked like you were holding it together?
That's the conversation I had this week with Nina J. Smith.
And I need you to hear it.
When Life Changes the Plan Overnight
Nina was building a life. A career in wealth management and advertising. A marriage. Two babies, fourteen months apart. A New York City chapter that, from the outside, probably looked like everything was going according to plan.
And then it didn't.
Her marriage ended. Her children were one and two years old. Financial security disappeared overnight. And she was left standing in the middle of a life that no longer resembled anything she had planned, with two babies who still needed to be fed, bathed, held, and loved, regardless of how shattered she felt on the inside.
She told me that survival mode felt like a blur.
Not because she was weak. But because when you're a mother in crisis, you don't get to stop. You don't get to fall apart on schedule. You just keep going, and you process it later. Sometimes years later. Sometimes in a parking lot. Sometimes at two in the morning when the kids are finally asleep and the quiet is loud enough to finally feel what you've been outrunning.
Listen to the Full Conversation
STILL STANDING: Resilience, Reinvention & Rebuilding After Life Tries to Break You
ft. Nina J. Smith | Healing Through Conversations with Loveli Brown
📅 Premieres Thursday, July 9, 2026
Tune in to the "Healing Through Conversations Podcast" available on these platforms:
Alive Podcast Network App. Also streaming on Apple TV, Roku and Fire TV | YouTube | Spotify | Amazon Music |iHeart Radio | Pandora Radio
What Women Lose in Survival Mode
This is the part of the conversation I want to sit in for a moment, because I think it deserves more space than it usually gets.
When women spend extended time in survival mode, we don't just lose sleep. We don't just lose money. We lose something quieter and harder to name.
We lose confidence. We lose the ability to trust ourselves. We lose access to the parts of our identity that only show up when we feel safe enough to actually be still.
And then, because we are extraordinary, we keep going anyway.
Nina kept going. She rebuilt her finances piece by piece. She did the work. She showed up for her children. And in 2021, she bought her own home. Not because it was just a real estate transaction. Because it was the first time she had something that was entirely hers. Something no life change, no relationship ending, no external disruption could take from her.
She said: "No one can take it from me."
And if you understand why those words matter, if you've ever had security pulled out from under you, you know exactly what she meant.
Professional Heartbreak Is Still Heartbreak
Here's the thing nobody tells you about rebuilding: sometimes life comes back around.
Nina rebuilt. She stabilized. She found her footing. And then she walked into a professional chapter that she describes as the hardest season of her life, harder, she said, than the divorce.
Because this time she didn't have the same armor. This time, the emotional walls she had spent years building started to come down. And the pain came through.
Her children noticed. They started asking if she was okay. And there is something about being seen in your sadness by your own children, the people you thought you were protecting, that cracks you open in a way nothing else quite does.
She told me she stopped eating. She struggled to get out of bed. She describes what she went through as depression. Not a rough patch. Not a hard week. Depression.
And she got through it, slowly, imperfectly, and eventually, by reaching back toward the people who had believed in her before that chapter tried to rewrite her story. By connecting with Entreprenista, a community of women founders that gave her something the traditional professional world had never offered: a room where the whole person was welcome, not just the productive version. If you are interested in becoming a member of Entreprenista's wonderful community click here.
Healing Is Not a Straight Line
This is what I know as a mental health advocate, a life coach, and a woman who has been in my own seasons of rebuilding:
Healing is not linear. It is not tidy. It does not follow a schedule or a framework or a five-step program.
Sometimes you heal and then life sends you something that asks you to do it all over again, at a deeper level, with less armor, and more truth.
That is not failure. That is not a sign that you didn't do it right the first time.
That is the nature of being fully, honestly, courageously human.
What Nina did, allowing herself to actually feel the second round of pain instead of white-knuckling through it the way she had before, is one of the most advanced and most underrated forms of healing there is. She stopped performing strength. She let herself be seen. And she came out the other side with a clarity about who she is and what she deserves that survival mode, alone, could never have given her.
Giving Yourself Permission to Evolve
There is one more part of Nina's story I want to name, because she named it herself, and I think it took courage.
Nina fell in love. In a way she didn't see coming. With a woman named Melanie.
She held that privately for almost a year. Not out of shame, she is clear about that, but because it was hers first. Because the relationship deserved the chance to be real before the world had any opinion about it. Because she had been through enough to know that some things need to be protected while they're still becoming.
And when she did share it? She shared it on her own terms. In her own time. With the people who had already proven they could be trusted with the real her.
That is not hiding. That is wisdom.
And I want every woman who is in the middle of becoming someone the world didn't see coming, in any context, in any form, to hear this: You are allowed to know yourself before you explain yourself to anyone else. You are allowed to evolve at your own pace. And the people who are meant to love who you are becoming will still be there when you're ready.
Still Standing
The title of this episode is Still Standing.
Not because nothing tried to knock her down. Not because every plan unfolded the way it was supposed to. Not because she was unbreakable.
But because she is still here.
Still rebuilding. Still becoming. Still telling the truth, about survival, about depression, about starting over, about love, in a way that I believe is going to reach the women who need it most.
When I asked Nina what she would say to the woman who just found out her marriage is ending, the woman sitting in her car, not yet knowing what comes next, she didn't give me a motivational quote.
She said: Your story didn't end there.
And baby, if that's you today, if you're in the blur, if you're in the parking lot, if you're feeding babies and holding it together and processing it at two in the morning, I want you to hear that.
Your story didn't end there.
You are still standing.
And sometimes that is the whole, complete, sufficient miracle.
Listen to the Full Conversation
STILL STANDING: Resilience, Reinvention & Rebuilding After Life Tries to Break You
ft. Nina J. Smith | Healing Through Conversations with Loveli Brown
📅 Premieres Thursday, July 9, 2026
Tune in to the "Healing Through Conversations Podcast" available on these platforms:
Alive Podcast Network App. Also streaming on Apple TV, Roku and Fire TV | YouTube | Spotify | Amazon Music |iHeart Radio | Pandora Radio
📲 Follow Nina: @njsmith23 | Entreprenista.com
📲 Follow Loveli: @LoveliEsteem | LoveliEsteem.com
Loveli Brown, xoxo
Holistic Mental Health Advocate | Author | Relationship Recovery and Confidence Rebuilding Coach | Host of the Healing Through Conversations Podcast | Founder of LoveliEsteem, LLC
"Being able to articulate your feelings, wants, needs, and desires is the best way to advocate for yourself and the people that you love. This all starts with a conversation". Loveli xoxo
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