This essay series often connects stories from different communities in crisis. The question of resilience comes up a lot when talking about crisis. The word can definitely get weaponized, especially by schools and workplaces and recovery programs, particularly against young people growing up in hardship. Living in poverty? You just need to be more resilient. Traumatized? You just need to be more resilient. Resilience has been weaponized to measure the individual against their circumstances, and therefore not being resilient enough becomes a personal failing. Within systems like schools and corporations and clinical spaces, resilience has sometimes become a code word for, “We don’t want to see your suffering.” “Stop being a problem.” “Be easier.” “Need less.”
And so, the word resilience has also faced a lot of backlash, especially in progressive spaces and social media. As one organizer friend said during a recent conversation, “The schools in our neighborhood are always ‘resilience this’ and ‘resilience that,’ but has anyone stopped to ask why our kids have to be so resilient? They shouldn’t have to be this resilient. They shouldn’t have to go through the stuff they go through.”
However, resilience always returns as an inevitable question during adversity. Many communities and people are going through suffering that is unjust, that they shouldn’t have to face. But how do we survive this? The question can be practical. How do people give their communities the best fighting chance on a day-to-day basis? What does that look like? What does that take? But the question can also be existential. What does it mean to suffer? What are the choices we can make when faced with unimaginable pain? What is the human spirit, where do people find the strength to carry on?
In this essay, I would like to propose a concept of resilience that avoids weaponization but does not avoid the inescapable questions we face as humans who suffer. I would like to propose a model of resilience that everyone can participate in, not just the individuals who are the most stoic, tough, long-suffering, or heroic.
What if we think of resilience more as the ability to protect the good, rather than the ability to endure the bad?
What if resilience is not about your ability to get yelled at without crying,
Or get cut without forming a scar.
What if resilience is not about your ability to numb any signs of suffering in front of others,
Or shrink your needs to fit the size of negligence.
What if resilience is not about being able to take abuse without flinching,
Or hide the cracks of a broken heart.
What if resilience is not the ability to be palatable during adversity,
Or give birth without a single stretch mark.
What if resilience is not the ability to smile while insulted,
Or survive the storm without being weathered.
What if resilience is not about suffering the unimaginable and somehow remain unchanged,
As if you owed it to the world to hide all of its consequences.
What if we accepted that people are not going to make it through unscathed,
And are going to bleed, despair, go mad, go quiet.
Because these are what the evils of the world do to humans,
And no amount of resilience can spare the cost of what is done.
What if, instead, resilience is about the ability to protect the good things,
The silent sacred things within yourself and the world
That need tended.
What if resilience is opening the door for neighbors even when you’re having a bad day.
What if resilience is still watering the garden on the day of a funeral.
What if resilience is still saying “thank you” on a crowded bus.
What if resilience is a love called maintenance
That remembers to change the furnace filters and prune the trees and apply grout
To the rickety structures of life that hold us all.
Resilience protects the hand that feeds.
Resilience protects the heart’s ability to feel.
Resilience patches the roof
And lets a field lie fallow
Every now and then.
Resilience is whatever good comes to help
When the crying and the scars and the big feelings and the big needs and the flinches and the flashbacks and broken hearts and broken smiles and stretch marks and weather marks
All come to light.
Resilience is not the absence of consequences and costs.
Resilience is the good that comes to meet it.
Resilience does not control what wild and wounded guests arrive at the front door.
Resilience is the ability to run the guesthouse regardless.
I used to work with an underground railroad for queer people fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. There was a gay couple from Syria that I worked with for three years. They now live safely in Canada, but their journey was extremely harrowing. They lost family members to the Assad regime and to ISIS. Then some family found out about their relationship and tried to get them killed by falsely reporting them as draft evaders from Assad’s army. They were tortured in a Syrian military prison. One of the men, who I’ll call M., was then forced into military service. After his discharge, the two planned their escape. When they fled across the Turkish border the guards shot at them. They faced homelessness and starvation in Istanbul. When they tried to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, the trafficker manning their boat beheaded someone to show who was in charge. In Greece, M. was captured by a different ring of traffickers and escaped by jumping out of a second story window. The couple spent years in hiding, running from safe house to safe house, before securing a sponsorship in Canada.
Some years later, over late night coffee at a cafe in Toronto, I was talking with the couple about courage. M. said, “I’m not brave, I am always the weak one.”
I looked at him, stunned. I said, “You’re one of the bravest people I know.”
“Really?” he said. “Me?”
I met his gaze, this man who had survived war and torture and betrayal and kidnapping and hunger and hiding and running and not knowing whether he would ever be safe again and being told by the world that his sexuality made his life worthless. “Yes, you,” I said.
“But I get scared so easily,” he said.
“Courage isn’t always the absence of fear,” I said, “sometimes it’s the decisions you make even when you’re scared.”
“But I cry at everything,” he said.
“The fact that you’re still able to cry after everything that happened to you is nothing short of a miracle,” I replied.
This is the kind of resilience I am talking about. Through everything M. suffered, he never lost the good things about him. His softness and gentleness, his gigantic heart, his delicate nature, his sweetness and sass. What he took to be signs of weakness, I took to be signs of success. His fears and tears were not failures, they were merely his humanity showing as he survived the unthinkable. M., who had proven himself capable of both daring feats and steadfast patience, still thought himself weak because he feels so deeply. But in my idea of resilience, he is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.
I currently live and work at a sanctuary house for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in Chicago. Most food in the house we share communally. This is a practical necessity in a house where people are sharing kitchen space and refrigerators. Sure, everyone can have a couple things just for themselves, labeled with their name in Sharpie, but the basics have to be communal. For years, we upheld our food sharing system with no problem. People in the house came and went, people in the house had their conflicts with each other, but the food sharing held. No matter how bad the conflicts got, people still shared the rice and beans and eggs and milk.
Then a group of five guys moved into the house all at once. We had never had so many men in the house before. Some big drama erupted between them and one morning I came into the kitchen to find gallon after gallon of individually labeled milk, carton after carton of individually labeled eggs - the guys had divvied up all the food, refusing to share with each other because they were fighting. This was surprising, petty, and also practically impossible. There is not room in our kitchen for every person to have their own individual gallon of milk.
The way I’m thinking about resilience, this group of men was less resilient than all prior groups in the house, not because they had conflict, but because as soon as they had tension they failed to protect the good things that literally fed them. Resilience in this case is not the absence of conflict. It is whether or not the beneficial structures of life come to a sudden, screeching halt when there’s strife. All the previous years in the house showed that it was possible to protect the collective good even while enduring interpersonal troubles.
I’d like to think that this is a type of resilience that everyone can participate in. I’d like to think that this type of resilience involves skills that can be taught, learned, practiced, nurtured. You don’t have to be someone who never cries, who never gets mad, who never has a bad day, who hides all your emotions, in order to stay committed to the idea that the big bag of communal rice is for everyone. You don’t have to be at peace with everyone all the time to still use the same bottle of cooking oil. You don’t have to get along with everyone to still maintain the essential rhythms of daily life.
So my test of resilience is not how tough and unfeeling can you be - it’s…what does it take to knock you so off course that you can’t even share a container of salt with someone? What kind of stress makes all your good habits go out the window? What kind of stress makes all your good character traits dissolve?
During Ramadan I attended a talk led by Muslim Black Panther elders who had spent decades as political prisoners. The elders discussed spiritual preparation for calamity and what it means to be ready for extreme times. One elder told the story of surviving torture in prison, stripped of his clothing, chained to a table, beaten by guards. He recounted how even then, he still prayed salaat. He described how he unnerved the prison guards who were torturing him, how stunned they were that even under these circumstances he refused to give up his daily prayers. By protecting this habit, by protecting this aspect of his character, he made the guards feel less powerful, even for just a moment.
My grandfather got into a horrific car accident towards the end of his life. He was seriously debilitated in the wreck and fought an uphill battle to keep living until his body finally gave way. He lost the ability to walk, read, and eventually, eat. During his final struggles, he showed tremendous grace. The healthcare workers who interacted with him frequently described him as their favorite patient. They described how he fought for every scrap of life he could get, refusing to give up despite the odds, and how grateful and kind he was. He showed wonder at the simple pleasures he could still enjoy, namely the company of his loved ones, and reminders of the beauty of the world, like a cut flower, or a sunny day. My grandfather grew up near a watermelon patch and always loved the fruit. When he lost the ability to eat, he cajoled people to give him a little piece of watermelon just to keep on his tongue, just to taste. He would just savor it and smile.
Both of these elders passed their tests of resilience with flying colors. Both protected their humanity in the face of suffering and death. Both decided who they were going to be during their worst hours. And who they were was beautiful. They struck awe into the hearts of all who witnessed.
Maybe resilience is prayers whispered into cuffed hands.
Maybe resilience is the taste of watermelon.
Poems referenced:
“Atlas” by U.A. Fanthorpe, https://www.best-poems.net/u-a-fanthorpe/atlas.html
“The Guest House” by Rumi, https://www.poetry.com/poem/28064/the-guest-house
Music in the audio version:
“Asr” by Lyn Rye, From My Palms Aurora Threads
