The other day I was stopped on the street by someone who told me that during a particularly bad depressive episode in which she was hospitalised, she just thought of me and realised her life wasn’t actually that bad. Um, thanks? I’m not sure if that comment was more or less offensive than the guy who told me he “wasn’t sure how I got out of bed each day”. Cheers bro.
The short version is that in my twenties my boyfriend died suddenly while we were sleeping, nine years later my brother died suddenly at work and in 2022 our lives imploded (again) when my son was diagnosed with cancer and severe Guillain Barre Syndrome which has left him paralysed.
I’m fun at parties.
My point being that as someone who does, in fact, get out of bed each day and is apparently the personification of “worse” on the It-Could-Always-Be-Worse Scale, I believe I have the credentials to talk about resilience. Not how to attain it or strengthen it or build it, but why it can get fucked.
A quick Google search of “resilience” results in a list of definitions that are variations on a theme. The words “bounce back” appear in most. Positivity. Optimism. Overcoming adverse events. Coming back stronger than before. Yawn. Cringe. Vomit.
My issue isn’t necessarily the concept of resilience itself, it’s the way our culture has co-opted resilience to change its meaning. There is an emphasis here on the individual and not the collective. In many ways, it’s an excuse for society to place the burden of being OK on the person suffering.
To focus on resilience is to focus on what’s visible to the outside world, therefore failing to grasp what it costs to survive.
It also positions resilience as binary. The myth of resilience is that it’s an either/or situation. You’re either resilient or not. But this is rarely the case. Resilience is fluid, not an endpoint.
Nora McInerny is an author and podcaster who began speaking openly about loss and grief after the death of her husband, Aaron, from brain cancer, which followed the death of her father, after a miscarriage. She’s also fun at parties. “No matter how many lemons life throws at you, you do not owe anyone a glass of lemonade,” she posted on Instagram recently.
And I think this is where my bugbear with resilience culture comes from. It’s the performative resilience that society demands from people. “Be OK!” it says. “Inspire me!” it shouts.
“I’m very tired!” I want to shout back. “I’m exhausted!” I want to say. “I just need a little nap!”
It is uncomfortable when the people we love are in pain. It’s excruciating to bear witness to the aftershock of how cruel and random life can be. But we need to sit in this discomfort. It’s the very least we owe each other.
There is a passage from It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine that I return to often: “Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact … You need someone to hold your hand while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
True resilience is living with what is. Sometimes that looks inspiring and sometimes that looks like just getting through the day. It’s rarely pretty, often exhausting and always made easier without the burden of expectation.
Natasha Sholl is a writer and lapsed lawyer living in Melbourne. Her first book, Found, Wanting was published by Ultimo Press in 2022
