Building Resilience

Seldom do we hear anyone recommend resilience as a trait worth aspiring to. It implicitly admits the possibility of failure, and in a culture that sells its children castles built from a perfect world, aspiring to a trait that presumes your own failure is close to unthinkable. This isn't an argument against perfection — perfection is as legitimate an idealistic pursuit as any other. The problem starts when we forget it is, and always will be, a pursuit and not a guarantee. Believing blindly in the idealism itself is where the ship starts to rock.

The human condition, taken seriously, is overwhelmingly counter-intuitive to the version of ourselves we've popularly agreed on. The plain reality of our imperfection can break a person, when it doesn't have to be quite so harsh. It's strange how readily we support institutions that will go on treating the next generation exactly the way that shaped us into what we became. Our conditioning anchors our conscience early, and tends to keep tweaking our outlook for a very long time afterward.

Where does resilience actually come from as a trait? The strength of someone's character can, in a way, be measured by how resilient it is — and resilience, at bottom, is simply the ability to reset. What precedes that ability is being able to calibrate yourself regularly, honestly, without an audience. Self-awareness opens up a million possibilities, mostly because it removes some of the dependency on any one person to hold you together, and hands part of that job to a framework that goes beyond just you.

The ability to say out loud what state you're actually in, so the people around you can help, is its own measure of maturity — and it's also a genuine exposure, because the people around you are, by nature, wildly variable. A total lack of self-awareness produces the same fractures as an excess of it. Self-awareness is tangled up with a kind of tragedy from the start, if its roots come from wanting to exalt the self rather than simply see it clearly. I parted ways with my parents' expectations the moment I realised I had already become what they wanted — and that it still, somehow, wasn't proof enough for them. Their need for proof is what fuelled my own curiosity ever since. What counts as enough proof? How much of it does a person actually have to gather before they're allowed to stop?