I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m not exactly sure what I think yet. I often write to figure out stuff, and sometimes I get to the end with a “hmmm, I still don’t know.” Actually- I never figure it all out. But yay you- I drag you along for the ride. hahahaha.
Ok but for real, I was thinking the other day about resilience now that it’s sort of the new buzz word for being mentally healthy in a time when being mentally healthy is mentally …. challenging. Resilience is used to describe the optimal life-skills for folks to have while encountering life’s ups and downs. It’s a way to acknowledge that life isn’t always peaches and cream and we can’t avoid hardship as a unilateral mental health strategy. When we’ve been faced with some bizarre communal downs, it becomes more important to talk about these skills for facing hardship.
We’re especially focused on children building resiliency, and ways to foster that, because we can already see that their lives are prime for suffering. They are inheriting the sins of all generations, and the best we seem to be able to do is teach them coping mechanisms. We’re working on solutions (kinda), but in the meantime: try to cope.
What exactly is resiliency? From an emotional perspective, resiliency is the ability to “bounce back” from a challenging time. “The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” This is not the toughness of the Boomer generation, where you just forge ahead with blind optimism and never look back (sorry Boomers, but that’s kinda your mantra). No, the new resilience is being able to face the difficulty, embrace it, process it, feel it, and then recover. In terms of a material resilience, the word describes an object’s ability to “spring back into shape.”
I personally define resilience with a combination of the emotional and physical definitions: the ability to spring back into yourself after a challenge.
So adaptation: not a word we use as much because I think it has more negative connotations. What does it mean to adapt? Adapt: to “become adjusted to new conditions.”
Here’s the thing. The way we talk about resilience (and the way the word is defined) assumes that difficulties have a beginning and an end. It’s a bit linear in understanding, assuming that life comes along in clearly ear-marked waves of hardships, followed by calm seas in which you show your resilient snappy-back self.
We all know that life does not play out like that. If you keep with the sea imagery, we don’t stay standing at the shore our whole lives waiting for the tide to come in and out. Even in reality, the sea is very adamant that you must move. If you’ve ever stood at the shore with your bare feet in the sand, where the waves slide up to you, even there in the calmest part, your feet will sink. The ocean is not about stillness. You have to move to stay above ground. Life takes you everywhere, so your life-ocean happens through all sorts of experiences: in a boat, in a kayak, on a surf board, floating, sinking, wading, drowning, dry, wet, snorkeling, diving, submarining! To stay in one place is not only ill-advised, it’s impossible.
Resilience means going back to yourself. So what does it mean to snap back to ourselves after a difficulty when we and everything around us are constantly moving, changing, shifting, growing? And, not to get too meta, but who even are we? Isn’t the very definition of “ourselves” a changing, morphing thing? I would argue that it would be detrimental to our physical, mental, social, and spiritual health if we only have one definition or concept of ourselves. That too, must shift and change for us to live a life that is thriving (hell, even surviving).
Is it possible to go back to yourself? I would argue in theory, that you can never truly go back because of life’s inevitable changes. It’s like going back to your hometown after having left for years. Everything is different, even if the structures are all still there. Time has passed. People have aged, moved away, been born, died. You have aged, moved away, seen birth and death. Nothing is the same.
So when we talk about mental health skills, I think the term resilience misses the boat a bit. We aren’t doing just resiliency, we aren’t just bending and straightening back up after being knocked down: we are also growing, changing, evolving, devolving, aging, aching, thriving, allllll of it. We are in a constant state of adaptation. Resilience without adaptation is stagnant.
Put us in a different culture and decade and our resilience that works now might be caput (or put into overdrive), because we haven’t had the steady adaptation to the environment. Here’s an example: right now I am challenged by masks because I can’t read people’s lips. My resiliency is my own patience, self-advocacy, and the bath I take after a long day of challenging communication to help myself feel whole and healthy again. My adaptation is that I now need to come up with better tools for hearing, because lip-reading was one of the main ones. Maybe I learn sign, maybe I start distributing clear masks, maybe I use my live transcription app, maybe I pretend to hear (and oldie but a goodie), maybe I say fuck it and don’t go anywhere and order everything online. These are adaptive skills available to me for the task at hand. Now put me in a time period when deaf = dumb, or institutionalized. There I would have no agency, no advocate, no hearing aids, no self to get back to because myself was ignored to begin with. My resilience without adaptation might be simply retaining the will to stay alive. My adaptation is either to find connection, help, and fight for more tools and to be heard, but it would be a steep learning curve, testing my resilience.
Back to the adaptation definition: to become adjusted to new conditions. There’s a shadow side of adaptation. It is what keeps us alive, and yet, it can also be the death of us. Maladaptation is a thing. Just ask the lobster boiled in a pot. Sure, he stayed alive for a bit…
We adapt as individuals and we adapt as a society. We wish it was all progress, but sometimes it’s a sheer cliff of decline. Progress: we have adapted into a society where talking about gender identity is no longer an impossibility. (Though, to be fair, many indigenous and ancient cultures would argue that this wasn’t an impossibility until colonizing cultural agents put their gendered ideas into powerful mainstream control.) Decline: we have also adapted into a society where capitalism seems to be a given and hustling for money is a badge of honor. Pro/Con: We have adapted to a world with a new deadly disease. Pro/Con: We’ve adapted to different standards of living (no more washboard laundry, but also: hello pollution). We adapt our resumes to the jobs we want. We adapt our activities to match our aging or disabled bodies. Sometimes adaptation is a circle of life thing without any good or bad value, it just is: jagged-edged rocks being slowly worn down over time and smoothed into dull stones until at last they are washed out to sea as sandy molecules. These are just small examples, but you can see that even within one adaptation, there is significant nuance as to whether or not it is good.
We adapt SO well, that often we do it without even thinking about it and we don’t always know if we should be adapting. But if we stop, we die. In this line of arguments, I would re-define resiliency as the ability to adapt, and still feel ok about it and myself. My resiliency comes and goes. There are some things that I don’t feel good about how I adapted. There are some adaptations that are out of my control. I either adapt or die, or something close to it. I don’t like existing in a white, patriarchal, colonizing, capitalistic (without end), consumerist society. But I am woven within the tapestry. To somehow exit this society would be to unravel myself, potentially to the point of poverty and death. (I keep mentioning death- sorry). So instead of spending all my time and energy towards that unraveling that may be my undoing, I adapt. In this case, my resilience is the cognitive dissonance life requires to be aware and alive.
We adapt to suffering. There is a moving horizon of what we can endure. I comforted my child who was upset after a dentist visit triggered his gag reflex, and I thought, oh God, this is not even close to the worse it will get. Of course he was uncomfortable, of course that was hard. I don’t want to minimize his suffering. Glennon Doyle is quoted saying “we can do hard things,” because of this very dilemma: we as humans know that whatever we’re facing today, we CAN face, but that doesn’t make it less hard. I thought about myself as a 14 year old, having spinal surgery. Having every muscle in the back of my neck cut through and stitched, no, STAPLED back together. Having the weight of my hair shock me to tears with pain when I got it wet for the first time after my surgery. I thought of that and thought: how the hell did I do that?! Because not only CAN we do hard things, we HAVE to, all the time. Our “resiliency” improves (mostly) with practice, but you won’t hear me tell my son that his gag reflex isn’t the hardest thing he’ll face. He doesn’t need to know that. I don’t know what he’ll have to face. But I know he’ll adapt or die. He’ll have to. And the gag reflex will soon pale in comparison, because the horizon of bearable suffering will have moved with time and experience. That’s a fact of life.
Our ability to adapt to suffering is not always a great thing. Just because you CAN do hard things, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. This adaptation skill is how people stay in bad relationships, bad policies, bad jobs, bad everything. We forget it hurts, but only because that’s how we survive.
We even adapt to our successes. That moving horizon of joy is a thing. Who here cannot fathom living on the income they made when they first got a job? Some of us may still be doing it, but if you’ve escalated your standard of living, you’ve adapted to it. Your house is now only just meeting your needs. Your income, your car, whatever you have is what you need. Your vacation, your travel, all now a new standard of living that instead of being “dreams” is “adequate.”
To pull it all together, I’m not sure exactly what my point is. Here’s what I’ve learned by writing it out: resilience is not enough. Adaptation is imperative to survival. Adaptation can also kill us. Resilience in this world is the ability to adapt and feel OK about it and myself. Resiliency is not always healthy. But healthy is not always possible. We CAN do hard things and we HAVE to do hard things.
I think my biggest takeaway is that there is no “back to shape” return for those of us living life here on this blue planet. Everything is always in flux. Resiliency with adaptation is our capacity to hold space for whatever shape we want to be.
