What does it mean to be resilient?
I am not resilient. I keep telling my friends that I switched jobs 8 times in the past 8 years, as much as I don’t want it to define me (it was even the point of another article I wrote). And each time, some of my friends would say it would make me stronger, that it would take me to a better place. I hated when people told me that, because it felt like it discounted all the hard work and effort I put in before. It would be easier to believe it, I suppose, if I ended somewhere ‘better’: a job with a better position, a better paycheck.
Even now, even when I’ve decided to start freelancing, it feels like I have a long way to climb. After all, I need to pay the bills, right? There are so many stories of freelancers succeeding in building their business, why does it feel like people don’t point out the long hours, the late nights, the anxieties of whether you get to pay off your bills every month.
Is that resilience?
Bouncing Back, Again
Some people say it is. All I see is work, and to be honest, I already get tired when I hear how people hustle. I asked a friend how she was able to do that, to bounce back. She resigned because she was working 18-hour days, 7-day weeks as a special-needs educator for children. But she still needed to find a job, because she needed to pay rent and pay for her expenses. She just told me: ‘I just have to. What choice do I have?’
It was such a simple answer, even if I wasn’t sure if she was actually happy when she said it. There was this resigned smile on her face when she said it. And yet, she was still cheerful as ever, joking and laughing with my friends and I. Sure, sometimes she would get anxious and agonise over the uncertainties. But she still wakes up, and does what she needs to do, seemingly without needing any extra energy.
For me, it feels like I have to search high and low, dig ever deeper to find the energy to feel like I’m on solid ground. And even when I do get on solid ground, it feels like I need to always suppress the worst tendencies of myself. That sometimes makes me feel worse, because it feels like the wires in my brain are messed up on such a fundamental level. So then—
What is resilience?
I pondered about this question. I didn’t think resilience was an ‘official’ term used by mental health experts. I never thought of it that way. Resilience—the ability to cope with tough events. Or, as Healthhub puts it, ‘A resilient person facing a difficult situation is like a football bouncing back after being kicked.’ That makes it sound like the football actually enjoys bouncing back. But bouncing back isn’t always as fun as it sounds. As we all go through challenge after challenge, what is resilience?
The idea of resilience changed over the years. The earliest ideas about resilience saw it as a mix of protective factors that helped people bounce back from tough times. Then, these factors were mostly thought to be internal traits like self-esteem, temperament, and emotion regulation—vis a vis the whole nature versus nurture argument. But then researchers realised that external factors, such as the social environment and family background, also play a big role. As such, early efforts to boost resilience included programs to strengthen these internal traits and community initiatives to improve external conditions.
However, experts and researchers shifted the way they thought about resilience. Some thought of resilience as more a dynamic process, instead of a specific internal trait. So instead of improving some innate skill, it’s seen more as an approach to help people improve their lives. Some researchers even noticed this approach, where athletes see resilience as a skill that improves over time while they learn different ways to face challenges. That idea has since become the prevailing consensus among researchers and experts, where resilience is the connective tissue between risk and protection, difficult experiences and future outcomes, encouraging people to use all the tools they know to manage tough situations, to bounce back, perhaps.
Can we train resilience?
In other words, can we train ourselves to bounce back? Some research seems to say yes. The American Psychological Association that “the resources and skills associated with resilience can be cultivated and practised.” There are a million other articles that can show you how you can be more resilient.
But the picture isn’t as clear-cut as you might think. In one 2018 study by the University of Waterloo, resilience scores only improved for participants low in resilience before the intervention. Participants who already had high resilience did not experience improvement. The study posits that, once trained, individuals will carry the skill for future adversities and remember to use them. However, even as resilience interventions were found to be most successful in sports, interventions were less effective in military, healthcare, and school settings.
So context does matter when it comes to training resilience. One exercise may work for one but not the other. Some researchers began seeing that coping and resilience as two different processes, where resilience may influence how someone sees adversity, while coping refers to the different strategies when something difficult happens.
Even then, some individuals can benefit from positive or negative experiences to different degrees based on their innate responsiveness to environmental conditions—something called differential susceptibility. This means that some would be less affected by adverse conditions, but would also benefit less from positive experiences. The opposite could be true as well: where some may be more susceptible to negative situations that may benefit much more from positive environments. So resilience may be trainable in some, but not all, and more vulnerable people may benefit more from interventions aimed at improving their resilience.
So, what does it mean to be resilient?
It took a long while to write this section. When I read that resilience may be trainable but not for everyone and that some may need a positive environment to thrive. I related to that. I feel like I never quite know how to ‘stay strong’, but I always have people who are willing to help. I was lucky to have found the right therapist to help me through my problems as well.
I think for me, there’s a lot of shame involved. Because it feels like I’m turning 30 and I’m back at square one. I’ve lost my sense of purpose that drove me because I thought as a Malaysian who came to work in Singapore, I would have done more by now. At this point, I don’t really know how to move forward.
But as I research and write for this article, I realise that I have to build my resilience bit by bit. I’m not the kind that looks at life’s challenges and moves on. And even then, I’m sure that people who seem to do that have their own pains to cope with too.
I wish there was some grand proclamation I could say at the end of this article, but I can’t find it. It also doesn’t feel right to write it as well. So I’m just taking it day by day, trying to listen to my body, trying to allay grief by forgiving myself, and still my anxiety by having faith in my journey. Perhaps that is resilient enough.
