Rise and Outshine

Anti-bullying campaigns are all the rage these days, but not when I was growing up. In middle school, I was bullied relentlessly, mostly by girls. I was awkward, chubby, wore coke-bottle glasses from the age of seven, and hit puberty early—a full recipe for playground disaster. I basically had no friends, and once even gave a girl all the coins in my little piggy bank just so she’d leave me alone. She took the money and kept harassing me. No matter how much I begged my parents to let me stay home from school, they sent me back. So, I made a vow of revenge. One day I would leave that place and build a life so big, so far beyond their reach, that anyone who ever hurt me would need binoculars to see me again.

That was my earliest memory of what I now call bouncebackability. The bullying stopped once I entered high school, only to be replaced with the teenage angst and anguish of insecurity and all the emotional landmines that come with growing up. But by then, for better or worse, my earlier experience of being bullied had already planted in me the conviction that every rejection, every humiliation, would become fuel for the revenge of a better life. Because there comes a moment, after you’ve taken enough blows, when you want the world to see what it tried, and failed, to break. 

Armenia is now having that moment. 

Five years ago, this country was still treated by much of the West as a small, inconsequential, Russia-tethered state in a complicated region that most people didn’t understand and didn’t particularly want to. Ten years ago, it was barely on the map of global imagination except as diaspora, genocide, chess, churches, brandy, and mountains. Armenia was beautiful, yes, but also landlocked, blockaded, too close to Russia, too far from Europe, and therefore too inconvenient.

Then came 2020, with its devastating war, leaving thousands dead and a society gutted by grief, stripped of safety, security, and territory all at once. Three years later, the ethnic cleansing of the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh laid another thick layer of national trauma over wounds that had barely stopped bleeding. By any ordinary logic, Armenia should have collapsed inward, crushed by the weight of loss, destruction, and defeat so deep it could have swallowed the country whole.

But it didn’t. Instead, it has now become the place everyone wants to be.

This week alone, Yerevan is hosting the European Political Community summit, bringing in 44 heads of state and government, as well as senior European officials, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as the first non-European leader to participate in the EPC format. French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and a long list of other world leaders are in town. The first-ever EU-Armenia summit follows immediately after on May 4 and 5. Then comes the Yerevan Dialogue on May 5 and 6, bringing yet another cohort of diplomats, officials, experts, and power brokers into the city at the same time. 

Little old Yerevan isn’t watching history happen elsewhere anymore, and this isn’t some one-week diplomatic fluke. U.S. Vice President JD Vance came to Armenia in February, in what was the first ever visit by a sitting U.S. president or vice president to this country. Later this year, Yerevan will host COP17, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, placing Armenia at the center of global environmental diplomacy too. 

In just a few short years, Armenia has gone from being treated like a geopolitical black hole to becoming the region’s most desirable democratic bet. From a country presumed to be peripheral, it is now praised, courted, watched, and hosting the conversations everyone wants to join and the parties everyone hopes to get invited to. Look around the neighborhood. Russia is isolated and increasingly repressive. Turkey is politically fraught and economically tanking. Iran is sanctioned, volatile, and at war. Azerbaijan has oil and gas, but also political prisoners, show trials, and a human rights record that keeps tarnishing its carefully polished image. And Georgia, once the darling of the post-Soviet space, is quickly backsliding into political crisis. 

Armenia, meanwhile, is performing above and beyond all expectations. Its economy grew by 7.2 percent in 2025. It ranked number 34 out of 180 countries in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, miles ahead of Georgia (114), Turkey (159), Azerbaijan (167), Russia (171), and Iran (176). Its Freedom House score of 54 out of 100 similarly places it in a different democratic universe from Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Iran, and at the leading edge of the South Caucasus. In a region riddled with repression, corruption, sanctions, war, and petro-authoritarian hubris, Armenia has become the unanticipated bright spot.

Even the travel world has finally caught on to what Armenians have been screaming into the void forever. Armenia was named one of Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2025 country picks and included in The New York Times’ “52 Places to Go in 2026.” She’s no longer the awkward chubby kid in the corner. She’s now the kid everyone wants to play with and sit next to. 

That is how bouncebackability is the real revenge of a better life. When anyone knocks you down, you can either stay down, or you can get back up with dirt on your face and turn every fall or beating into your next level up. Not everyone who hurts you will apologize or feel bad about it. Most won’t. Some will never even notice. But you will. You will notice the distance between the pit they tried to bury you in and the stars you eventually reached. You will notice the difference between the pathetic version of you they imagined and the incredible life, country, self, or future you went ahead and built anyway. 

And then one day, when you least expect it, you’ll look around and see that you’ve risen so far, and shone so bright, that even you no longer recognize yourself. 

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Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “Rise and Outshine”.

Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.