I manifest resilience in my life, and I find it's one of my most enduring characteristics.
There are many ways in which my life has been privileged -- I was born into a white middle class family, I have been gifted with a good deal of analytical and verbal intelligence -- but I have had to overcome a childhood of bullying, unstable parenting, sexual abuse, and the beginnings of what was later diagnosed as Bipolar 2. I have made it to 55 years old with a reasonably well-balanced life.
As I wrote that, I realized that I (as I suspect many do) began to conflate resilience with accomplishment and judging my resilience by the degree of my accomplishment. This transmogrifies an ordinary, developable skill into an attribute of the rarefied few. This is the script of what I referred to yesterday as inspiration porn: " ... overcame a difficult childhood/debilitating disease/life-shattering accident to become a lawyer/doctor/marathon runner/fill in the blank with an accomplishment most of us reading the story couldn't manage. If I look at what I've accomplished (a modest career at a small Masters I university where I've made few waves, six novels that I can't get an agent for/published) I don't feel very resilient. But if I look at what I've survived, and the current quality of my life, I feel very resilient indeed.
If we want people to be resilient, we have to believe that resilience is ordinary, is learnable, is measurable by one's quality of life and not their level of achievement.
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