The Sunday Dreads Vol. 50 (?)
We have a love affair with the word resilience, at least here in the United States, which are the only states I’ve ever lived in aside from the State of Anxiety and the State of Panic.
Resilience is our standard for everything from tires to goldfish to human life.
When my husband died at age 35, I was told that I was resilient. That our son, not even two years old, was resilient. And this was meant as a compliment, or an affirmation: If you’ve ever had your human life fall apart, you’ve likely been told about your own resilience. How you’re built to bounce back. How you’re going to be just fine.
Meanwhile, you’re hanging from the edge of a cliff by one ragged fingernail above a pool of lava teeming with hungry (and lava-resistant) crocodiles with a taste for adrenaline-soaked people meat.
That word felt like a stiff arm to the chest. Like walking into a sliding glass door (don’t act like you’ve never done it). It felt like being told we don’t have to worry about you! You’ve got this!
Narrator: she did not, in fact, got this.
The Dictionary definitions of resilience that I looked up helped explain my feeling:
Not one of these definitions felt accurate for me, a young widow experiencing PTSD flashbacks, insomnia and regular panic attacks. And the problem with these definitions is not only that I looked them up like a high school freshman hoping to pad a five-paragraph essay, but that they reflect our broader American obsession with self-reliance, self-mastery, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and making sure that the setback is just a set-up for a comeback or whatever the inspirational Pinterest graphic tells you.
I looked resilient because I was not dead, and I kept my suffering to myself like a good Midwestern girl. I looked resilient because I knew that our cultural script insists that we perform our okay-ness even when we are terrible, thanks for asking.
I did not feel resilient, and that felt like a personal failure. A defect somewhere deep within me. Why couldn’t I just bounce back? Snap back into my former self? Move on, already.
Of course, I am resilient, and so are you. So are goldfish and quality tires! But what’s missing from our cultural (and dictionary) definitions of resilience is that it is not simply an inside job.
My resilience — my survival — is a reflection of my privilege. When Aaron died, thousands of strangers filled an online fundraiser (humiliating and humbling!) that helped me pay off the medical debt, pay for a funeral, keep my face out of the water while I kicked furiously beneath the surface.
My resilience was not about trying to get back to who and how I was, but about trying to adapt to who I was becoming and what my life was now.
For years I’ve been giving a keynote1 called Redefining Resilience about all of this, and I’ve met thousands of people who feel the same way: that being told they were resilient felt like being told they should be able to handle things that nobody can handle alone.
So when The Resilience Myth by Soraya Chemaly crossed my desk, I dropped literally everything to open the galley and dig in…and it was even better than I hoped it would be. It’s an exploration of our cultural Resilience Myth, and how it connects to everything from Toxic Masculinity to Toxic Positivity to Twilight (!!!) to 9/11 to Ernest Shackleton.
I wore out a highlighter on lines like:
Mental habits tied to resilient — “optimism”, “gratitude”, “positive feelings,” “grit” — assume a baseline of feeling safe and physical stability. If your heart is racing and you feel chronically anxious or hyper vigilant, it is hard to muster the reserves to feel optimistic or grateful.
An entire generation of American children, now known as Generation Resilient, have never known a world where the threat of mass murder isn’t a daily reality. If resilient children are “strong” and “smile” as they walk back into a classroom after a mass shooting that injured them and killed their teachers and friends, then children who are anxious and angry and refuse to return might be considered the opposite: lacking in resilience, weak, and fragile. Not gritty enough.
If you lose a spouse and don’t recover in a timely fashion, what’s wrong with you? If you miscarry and don’t immediately try again to get pregnant, then buck up and do so. If you are angry for your losses and don’t feel like “a better person” who has learned valuable lessons, do you feel shame? Speed and urgency foreclose self-compassion and empathy, easily contributing to unhealthy tactics and short-term Band-Aids instead of sustained and healthier outcomes.
I loved it so much I had to interview her and dust off the TTFA feed to put it out in public.
I loved it so much that I made a YouTube video about it.
Yeah that’s right I’m on YouTube having the time of my life and if you’re into that place (I love it) we have 2 videos coming out every week!
I made a list of all the things I love at Nike (most of which are on sale right now with an extra 20% off if you simply make a Nike account and use code FLASH20).
If you’ve ever asked me “what lipstick are you wearing?” the answer is one of these.
Keep Trying She Tried…
My other career is as a speaker, and honestly, I’m so good at it. Contact Brenda Kane - bkane@apbspeakers.com - for more info!
Absolutely brilliant. You could not have expressed these thoughts any better for those of us who are still struggling with terrible loss. I immediately shared your post with my daughter who I knew would totally love and relate to it.
A big YES to this. I found a companion statement was often “I could never do what you’re doing” which seemed to mean the person was admitting they were not this textbook version of resilient and that they personally would not be able to stay not dead in a crisis or grief. It’s crazy how alienating and isolating well-intended support can be.