8:42pm November 20, 2010

Resiliency

Recently a woman I know told me I was very resilient. At the time, I simply agreed. I have noticed over time that I am capable of putting up with damn near anything, at least compared to many people I meet. Sure, there’s an adjustment period, but overall I adapt fairly well. I generally count this as one of my strengths.

But she isn’t the first person to call me resilient or similar. And often people call me that when I ask them to adapt to situations that I consider rather trivial, sometimes even for reasons that are more cultural than personal. It’s a way of saying that I’m just somehow made of sterner stuff than they are, so they shouldn’t have to be expected to put up with these situations. Or so that they don’t have to think about how they would in fact adapt if they had to.

And the thing is, I don’t think my resiliency, such as it is, came from an innate trait of being stronger or braver than they are. It came more from being repeatedly subject to both very shitty situations, and situations that seem very shitty if you come at them from certain perspectives. And finding that sometimes all that “coping with a situation” means is that you lived through it, no matter how it felt to do so. And that all those terrible feelings are just feelings. Some of them pass quickly, some of them pass long after the situation has ended. But they do pass, and they don’t necessarily reflect reality. They’re just emotions.

I don’t know how to explain what “just emotions” means to anyone who still experiences them as if they are something as solid as the ground they stand on. I am a very emotional person myself and have always felt them strongly and once feared them as huge tidal waves, but somewhere I learned that they (including my fear of them) are my reactions to reality, not a reality of their own. And that even the most intense of them won’t kill me. I learned this through long, repeated experience, not through a magical innate trait of being unaffected by them.

Okay, I know that even myself of ten years ago is skeptical of all this because she sees herself as a permanent abject coward who will probably be killed by all of these feelings and experiences someday. But it’s true. She and I only differ in life experience. We’re not genetically distinct. She is learning some of her first lessons in “I thought I could never survive this particular situation but here I am surviving it,” although she barely realizes it and is still living minute to minute.

I don’t think of her and me as the same person exactly, because we love in different times. But clearly the difference between us isn’t that I was gifted with a prepackaged set of resilience and she wasn’t. I am resilient because of what has happened between then. Which is a decade of new experiences and my responses to them. Besides the new experiences I have learned new ways of approaching various experiences.

So if I am not just different entirely from myself ten years ago, I have serious doubts that all these people (who think I’m just innately more resilient than they are) are actually right about me. I suspect if they lived through the same things and learned the same ways of responding to them, most of them would at least equal my capacity to deal with unpleasant situations. And their belief that we are just innately different lets them off the hook from learning to adapt, as well as lets them view me in ways that are probably far from valid. While I definitely do have a fair bit of resilience in areas that have nothing to do with disability, this still feels at times like just a new variation to that thing disabled people hear all the time about how we are just stronger or braver than others. Which, among other things, lets them keep their prejudices that our body configurations are a fate worse than death. No, really, they’re not.