If you don't feel resilient, you're probably the most resilient of all

You’ll never convince me otherwise.

This behaviouralist adaptation of resilience, which speaks to ‘how easily we can bounce back after an adverse experience’ is a trick.

A way of training us to think we should be recovery machines. That if we don’t recover, emote, express, feel or sense the quick and easy way then we need work.

It’s part of the great gassy lie that sold the western world the ideology of normal.

We have been deeply and unashamedly conditioned to believe the concept of average/normal/mainstream, and that this place is the right place to exist. But if we look at the concept of ‘mainstream’ throughout the context of history it is so very clear that it was never just framed as the ‘best’ way to be, but as the ‘right’ way to be, with everything else being the ‘wrong’ way.

Mainstream/average/normal (whatever you want to call it) has always been the most malleable place for a human population to fit in, follow instructions, do what’s expected, strive for sameness, contribute taxes, perpetuate systems that serve higher powers, not rock the boat etc etc. So mainstream/average/normal has always been presented to us as the gold standard.

But resilience can not be tricked nor contorted to fit a mould, because resilience is a foundational element of aliveness, not a strategy, skill or behaviour.

Resilience.

The capacity of a container to maintain it’s shape. To bend and not break. A concept that only makes true sense when considering past, present and future as a pathway. The human condition.

• If you’re alive right now? Even though you wonder how it’s possible you could be, then your resilience is off the charts.

• If you are shut down, switched off, flooded with emotion, unable to work, unable to sleep, unable to figure out a solution, and you are this person day after day after day? Your resilience is undeniable.

• If your physical capsule (your human body) is beating and breathing then you are resilient.

To reduce our human capacity for survival, despite the challenges and pain, to a skill we need to develop is a travesty.

And look, this isn’t a dig at behaviouralists either. Behaviouralism was an ideology born out of a disconnection from ancestral knowledge and pre tech/science based knowledge systems - so it had a reason and a place. And it still does have a place, in so much that is now allows us to move through and beyond it. (And also, maybe behaviouralism has other little pockets of gold that I just don’t know about because I'm head strong about this stuff and haven’t explored the potential).

But please remember this, if you take anything from this short rant, it’s that you being alive means you are resilient.

You have been bent and burnt and broken and fucked over and you are continuing day after day. That’s not something you need to work on.

That’s true human aliveness.

(And i don’t recommend aiming to bounce back after an adverse experience, I find that becoming a new version of who I was before much more empowering).

xxx

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