On Resilience
“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.” — Aristotle
When I think about the language of resilience, I spontaneously imagine a conversation on this topic with my Russian family. My father would have dismissed it right away as meaningless and trivial. My mother would have hesitated, got quiet and said something about working hard all her life in order to make it from day to day. In real life this conversation could never take place for two main reasons. First, when I lived in Russia nobody ever spoke about ‘how’ they handled life difficulties, they just acted on a problem, or incorporated it into their lives and carried on. Second, the vocabulary for self-awareness and personal insights is very limited in Russian. The Russian word for ‘resilience’ is common in physics, used to render elasticity, or restoring force, but in the context of a human capacity to deal with life challenges, it does not make much sense, and sounds awkward. It would be difficult for me to think or speak about resilience in my mother tongue. For that I need a more adept language, but even then my account would be incomplete as words alone are often unable to grasp sensing rather than knowing and feeling outside our familiar boundaries.
Without being aware of this, I have been cultivating resilience for a long time. For me, the critical urgency for resilience arrived unexpectedly when I was 18 years old and my mother had a mental break down, that was the beginning of a life-long mental illness. It was my second year at University, life seemed perfect, as every day at school was filled with intellectual pursuits and joy. And then instantly, all of that changed. The life that I shared with my classmates was still there, but it was no longer mine, I was shut off, heading alone into the unknown. I desperately needed skills for survival and endurance, but fear, helplessness and grief incapacitated me. To accept that my mother had a mental disease and would never fully be her normal self was the most difficult. Hope that this was just a one-time occurrence due to stress, that the doctors might be wrong, that medicine will help, delayed my acceptance, but at the same time, like a cushion, it softened the blows of the reality, and gave me time to get closer to the acceptance inch by inch. The truth that my mother was mentally ill was not only cruel and painful, but inconclusive and blurry. With many other diseases, the doctors more often than not are confident about both the diagnosis and prognosis, but with mental illness, they shy away, speak vaguely, injecting ‘unclear,’ ‘possibly,’ and ‘not sure,’ into the conversation. And with a lack of clarity about my mother’s psychotic behavior, it felt like balancing on a beam across a void. It took me a long time to steady myself, and gradually, I let myself come closer to the core of that inconclusive truth. I would visualize the worst — my mother is forever captured by her demons, unable to recognize me, confined for the rest of her life in a dreadful public mental hospital, and I Iose her forever. Staying with that vision was terrifying, and cruel to myself, but I was able to tolerate it. From there I would move on to more optimistic scenarios, where she recovers, if not fully, and regains the connection with me and the real world. And just like a pendulum, I went back and forth between the reality, imagining the worst, and hope, and each time the swing of the pendulum moved a little farther towards accepting the truth. With this motion, without knowing it, I was building my resilience. At the same time, my hope was transforming itself. Fom a willful and impatient wish for an immediate remedy, it softened with patience and led me to self-reliance and attention to supporting my mother. And this is how I found my path to resilience, following the shortening swings of the pendulum of my emotions. Later in life, it served me again and again when I had to deal with disappointment, misery, or pain. Building resilience has been an experiential process, just like resilience suggests there must be something to bounce off, it requires interaction, engagement and force.
