The Thing About Resilience Is I Don’t Really Have Any
I like to think of myself as a strong person. Someone who can deal with things, who can handle whatever life throws at her. The truth is, though, I have no way of knowing if that’s the case. I turn 28 today, and in all those 28 years, nothing truly terrible (i.e. the kind of thing that would actually test my resilience) has happened to me. Part of what makes humans strong is our ability to cope with hardship. We’re challenged and tested by our experiences — but what happens when, overall, those experiences aren’t actually all that trying?
As an editor at Femsplain, I read every story published on this site — every story about adversity and abuse, every story about the awful things that have happened to many of the women writing for us — and it makes me wonder: Could I handle that? Because, often, I don’t think I could.
Before I go any further, let me clarify: I do not envy anyone who’s suffered a tragedy. I would love nothing more than to continue my relatively charmed, grief-free life as is. Has it been perfect? Of course not. My heart has been broken numerous times, I very recently had just $15 in my bank account, I have family… issues — basically the kind of problems that, in the grand scheme of things, are or border on non-problems. The past 28 years have by and large been good ones — which make me all the more worried some kind of cosmic karmic force is gearing up to ruin my life. It’s completely irrational, but I can’t help but feel the longer I go without something really bad happening, the worse it’ll be, and when it finally hits me, I’ll lose myself, simply because my life hasn’t prepared me for anything harsher than a few sour breakups and abandonment issues.
It doesn’t help that it generally takes me a good hour to fall asleep, an unfortunate side effect of which being the sort of thoughts that occupy my mind as I try to drift into unconsciousness. These thoughts tend to be terrible, and are almost exclusively about the sudden, unexpected deaths of loved ones. My family, my friends, my boyfriend — in my mind, no one is safe. None of them know this, because rarely do conversations naturally progress into a “Btw, I think about you dying on a pretty regular basis” state.
While said boyfriend, for instance, effortlessly falls asleep beside me, I lay awake and think, Please don’t die. Please don’t get hit by a bus or pushed in front of a train by some random crazy person or choke on your dinner or have some secret heart condition your parents never told you about so you could live a normal life like in “How To Deal” and just collapse one day and be gone forever.
Okay, so maybe I have an overactive imagination. Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe I’m just morbid. The problem is, these things I worry about happen every day, and if they did, in my life, I really don’t think I could, in fact, deal.
Jennifer Malise, one of our regular contributors, wrote in her piece for this month, “The point of resilience is not to avoid falling apart. It is to fall apart completely, into a million pieces, and then stitch ourselves back together again.”
She’s right, and that’s what scares me, that I wouldn’t be able to stitch myself back together again after falling apart. I fully expect that I would take to my bed and never leave and just kind of give up. The alcoholism that runs in my family makes matters worse, serving as a constant reminder that my already fragile sense of resilience has a quiet, ever-present threat lurking in the background, ready to keep me from finding all of those million pieces.
But hey, maybe I’m totally wrong, and I have a thicker skin than I think. I guess I won’t really know until one of those terrible things actually happens and I’m faced with the decision of whether to grieve and move on, or, well, not.
