The Truth About Resilience
Resilience, I think, is a misunderstood concept. Well, at least, I think I’ve misunderstood it for a long time. For whatever reason, I guess I believed, for the last 10 or 15 years, that resilience was the ability to handle challenging situations. Life crises. Major difficulties. I thought that being resilient was about being able to meet challenges, solve problems, and come out on top, or better for the experience. Now that I write it down, I can tell it’s a rather superficial explanation. And for all the things I’ve lived through, and the challenges I felt I conquered, or didn’t as is more often the case, I’m a little surprised my definition hadn’t evolved.
The truth about resilience is that it’s not the ability to handle a crisis. It’s actually about the ability to recover from NOT handling a crisis. It’s about bouncing back after failure, recovering from a breakdown (or a breakup), and picking yourself up after falling. It’s not at all about preventing yourself from falling.
Life is full of falls and failures. Some lives are a string of failures. A veritable hurricane of challenges. Like walking against not only the wind and driving rain, but also huge skull-cracking boulders and flying debris being hurled at you. At least my life has felt that way.
And I spent much of it thinking that I wasn’t very resilient because I was still getting knocked down, scraped and bruised, so very wounded by the debris of life falling apart over and over again. Failure does have a way of making us feel like, well, failures.
But as I now realize, I am amazingly resilient. Superhuman-resilient. I have not once failed to get up, even after being down a long time. Even if I’m so scarred and broken that I can’t conquer the next challenge. And perhaps it is this, the past mistaken understanding of resilience, that kept me down in the first place. It’s also the reason I get up too soon, thinking that falling and failing is the opposite of resilience.
Perhaps if I wait a bit longer for a few breaks to heal, I won’t fall again quite so soon. Or if I do, the wound won’t be quite so deep.
The truth about resilience is that it’s not the ability to handle a crisis. It’s actually about the ability to recover from NOT handling a crisis. It’s about bouncing back after failure, recovering from a breakdown (or a breakup), and picking yourself up after falling. It’s not at all about preventing yourself from falling.
Life is full of falls and failures. Some lives are a string of failures. A veritable hurricane of challenges. Like walking against not only the wind and driving rain, but also huge skull-cracking boulders and flying debris being hurled at you. At least my life has felt that way.
And I spent much of it thinking that I wasn’t very resilient because I was still getting knocked down, scraped and bruised, so very wounded by the debris of life falling apart over and over again. Failure does have a way of making us feel like, well, failures.
But as I now realize, I am amazingly resilient. Superhuman-resilient. I have not once failed to get up, even after being down a long time. Even if I’m so scarred and broken that I can’t conquer the next challenge. And perhaps it is this, the past mistaken understanding of resilience, that kept me down in the first place. It’s also the reason I get up too soon, thinking that falling and failing is the opposite of resilience.
Perhaps if I wait a bit longer for a few breaks to heal, I won’t fall again quite so soon. Or if I do, the wound won’t be quite so deep.
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