Rethinking the Possible
I don’t know why, as people say of me, I am resilient. I am not sure any of us truly can, for everyone who goes on living, getting out of bed everyday, to face the problems and stresses and emotions both positive and negative has to be at least a little resilient. It isn’t just those of us who have grown up in or lived through traumatic experiences.
Read Scientific American Mind or The Wall Street Journal or, even, Good Housekeeping, and they all say the same about resilience, or the “process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of stress,” according to the American Psychological Association and to “bend but … not break when confronted with adversity, enabling him or her to bounce back relatively quickly,” (7) according to Scientific American Mind’s Be a Better You. They all say to have this kind of resilience, it is important to maintain a positive social network, exercise, and foster an ability to regulate emotions or how you respond to a situation.
Hmmm…a positive social network. I have had or not had that off and on throughout my so-called resilient years. Exercise then? Yes, but not to the degree that experts expect of resilient people. We will talk about that third item a little later. Experts also say that growing up in a positive home … well, no, that can’t be it. How about genetics? That one is a stretch when it comes to the day to day overcoming of a passel of years of trauma. Sure, maybe genetics help, but we are all hard-wired to live despite the fallen wreckage of this world we all traverse.
Now to that building up of an ability to respond positively to adversity. One thing I do know, is that resilience is not a denial of the negative emotions you may have, such as, sadness, hurt, and/or fear. If that were the case, I would not be sitting here typing this out today. I would have given up the ghost a very long time ago — literally. Those feelings are so present with me it is as if they are companions lounging around or pacing my home. In fact these companions are my default. Perhaps, that is what is meant by the “bending.” You acknowledge that you are grieved, pained, or afraid. You just don’t stop there. Oh, but it is so hard not to, and I am not sure why I have even kept just above the fraying of that bend toward breakage.
That same Be a Better You also has an article on open-mindedness or “[engaging] with the various percepts, patterns and perspectives that clamor for space in our mind” (70). It is about being creative and seeing the many options of an item or situation. It includes thinking outside the box.
Now this I understand. In this case, growing up in poverty is a plus, because you learn not just to make do, but to make it do whatever you want or need at the moment and to make it do something else you want or need in the next moment. It is me seeing those stemless wine glasses full of flowers or using faux garlands of greenery and berries as a wall border. It is knowing how to make the most of what money you do have — percentage off resale gift cards bought with percentage on credit card purchases gaining points on reward programs.
Open-mindedness doesn’t deny the perspectives that are the negative emotions. Open-mindedness doesn’t even deny the patterns of stumbling over roadblocks to resilience. Open-mindedness, at least in my case, does enable me, after these emotions and roadblocks, with various perceptions to create the next stepping stone forward. Oh yes, there are wrong paths taken, dead-ends, lost time, but all of that amounts to more experience as fodder for the creativity of open-mindedness.
I think for me this is the reframing of negative situations in due process that amounts to my resilience. I cannot seem to completely ever give up, so that means finding a way, some way to, as the American Psychological Association says, adapt despite adversity. Isn’t that just what each and every one of us has to do to survive?
