How Adaptability Can Be a Blessing — and a Curse

How many of you have used the word “adaptable” or its close cousin “flexible” in a resume, cover letter, or job description? Unless you’re an unabashed “You kids, get off my lawn!” kind of person, I’m guessing you have.
Why? Because adaptability is an asset. We all want employees who can fit in with our organizational culture, management style, office environment. When a project has to change course on a dime, we want someone who can make those changes quickly and effortlessly, and ideally without complaint.
I haven’t had much difficulty wriggling this word into my own job applications as I look for new opportunities during this (hopefully brief) period of unemployment. My spirit animal is a chameleon — perhaps best exemplified by a resume reflecting distinct twists and turns as I’ve adjusted to my changing circumstances. Moving abroad? Sure, I can do consulting and free-lance editing. Starting a family? I can switch from a travel-heavy job to something that keeps me close to home. My industry is losing funds? No problem, I’ll find a new one.
I euphemistically frame these professional adaptations as “seeking new challenges” but what I really mean is that I can deal with most anything life throws at me. This has been equally true in my private life where I learned to live as an expat spouse abroad, reinvented myself as a working parent in our nation’s capital, and eventually became comfortable in my suburban single mom skin. But more than the labels, I take pride in touting my ability to find — or create — normality in the face of any personal crisis. And those who know me can vouch — I’ve had a few.
I’m proud of this because, at the heart of it, adapting is the key to survival. God or Mother Nature (or the genetic roulette wheel) blessed us with this critical skill so that our species would not die out. Individually, those of us who can swim with the tides are less likely to drown.
In 1996, I visited Sarajevo shortly after the war had ended. I remember seeing UN tarps covering gaping windows that the snipers had shattered during the siege, fearfully sneaking around the city in the dark to avoid the checkpoints during curfew, and using buckets of water to “flush” the toilets because the plumbing had been destroyed. I wondered how anyone could live this way. Listening to their stories, though, I realized that people like me with lifestyles not unlike my own had slowly learned to exist in a war zone, descending step by gradual step from their workaday lives to a life in Hell. People were trapped, so those who couldn’t adapt didn’t survive.
Adapting is what keeps us from losing our minds when the unthinkable happens. In Option B, Sheryl Sandberg talks about coping with life after her husband’s sudden death. If we don’t find a way to stave off the grief, it will kill us, too. She calls it resilience; I call it adapting. When my own brother committed suicide, as devastated as we were, my sister and I started giggling like teenagers the night before the service as we printed photos of our brother and made jokes about the copy store’s weird signage. It didn’t just make us feel better in the face of this cavernous loss, it allowed us to get things done. Life doesn’t stop because we are suffering.
The same is true of our own deaths. Friends who have cancer talk about maintaining a “normal life”, even as their definition of normal changes. Some things can not be defeated or escaped, they can only be accepted. Living with dying goes against our nature; achieving that balance without losing our sanity may be the ultimate exercise in adapting.
Like all virtues, though, adaptability has its dark side. Let’s just say, I’ve seen more than my share of courtrooms and medical facilities, and it’s alarming how quickly they can come to feel routine. Making the strange seem familiar helped me “get through” some difficult times, no doubt. But certain situations are called “intolerable” for good reason; learning to tolerate them is not always the best thing.
Millions of people (myself among them) have learned to adapt to abusive relationships — sometimes so thoroughly that we don’t even know we are in them. Broken plates and bruises lose their shock value after the second or third time. Police calls stop being an embarrassment. We accommodate those we love and normalize their bad behavior so that we don’t feel bad about ourselves or them. We want to feel normal, like our partners are normal. If not, we can find ourselves so lost in depression and fear that we become paralyzed. Of course, domestic violence is about much more than avoidance and accommodation. Make no mistake, I’m not blaming the victim, but I’ve found in my own experience that the ability to adapt to the unimaginable was a major obstacle in recognizing the abuse and leaving it behind.
In my current state of “stunemployment”, my friends and family tell me I am adapting surprisingly well. I am upbeat in the midst of a lousy situation, focused on my job search and open to any opportunity. I am staying engaged in my profession, pushing myself to look in new directions, and actually enjoying all this free time, while doing some contract work here and there.
However, I am on constant guard against getting too comfortable with my new reality. I could happily push away thoughts of potential destitution and just enjoy a lazy summer. It’s easier to stay upbeat when you don’t contemplate the unthinkable “what if’s.” But, without those “what if’s”, would I keep applying for jobs in what feels like an impossibly crowded labor market? Would I get up everyday and search through job sites and draft cover letter after cover letter if I didn’t have that nagging fear in the back of my mind? Perhaps I would just put my faith in the cosmos and wait for the right thing to find me. Perhaps I would try my hand at ventures that would leave me personally fulfilled but financially bereft. In time, the funds would dry up and I’d be knocking on my relatives’ doors asking for loans. Would I adapt to living in my sister’s basement? I’d rather not find out.
Adaptability is indeed a blessing and a critical survival skill — until it becomes a curse. Sometimes it allows us to accept what we cannot change, and that keeps us going. Other times it enables us to accept those things we really should change, and that works against us.
Being a chameleon, I have adapted to this new landscape of unemployment, well enough to survive but not so well that I forget where I am and the dangers surrounding me. Eventually, I will find a new leaf to land on. Whatever my next environment, I will adapt to it. Until I don’t. At which point, perhaps I will change the environment to adapt to me.
