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pachyderm · Apr 14, 2021 at 07:38 AM

Don’t Mistake Silent Endurance for Resilience - The New York Times

Quote:

Mental health professionals like to say that we’re all floating around the world like little rubber bands: We encounter a challenge, which makes us stretch, grow and bounce back. That’s how resilience is meant to work.

But that all assumes that hard times end. What if there’s always something else? What if you go through a year as relentless as this last one has been for so many of us: illness, death, home-schooling, job losses, systems crumbling left and right? An entire year of hobbling around with two flat tires but only one spare, praying for an uneventful day or two, until the next tire blows?

What happens is that you get used to it — something with which I am all too familiar. Tolerating things I didn’t enjoy was, for a long time, my superpower, one I had cultivated after an eventful childhood. By many metrics my upbringing was blissful: boundless love, laughter, globe-trotting adventures. But I also know change and trauma, having moved over 30 times over three decades, across a childhood punctuated by dramatic loss, including violent conflict in my homeland, Kashmir, and the death of my beloved grandfather. My little rubber band eventually settled, taut and brittle, seemingly forever. In powering through the discomfort of constant change, I became inured to it.

Resilience without any waning period, turned into endurance, and I became adept at snuffing out my own vulnerability and discomfort before I even felt it. I grew into someone who could live anywhere, befriend anyone, be anyone, do anything — the harder, the better.

And it was these exact qualities that garnered praise.

Sound familiar?