I manifest resilience in my life, and I find it’s one of my most enduring characteristics.
There are many ways in which my life has been privileged — I was born into a white middle class family, I have been gifted with a good deal of analytical and verbal intelligence — but I have had to overcome a childhood of bullying, unstable parenting, sexual abuse, and the beginnings of what was later diagnosed as Bipolar 2. I have made it to 55 years old with a reasonably well-balanced life.
As I wrote that, I realized that I (as I suspect many do) began to conflate resilience with accomplishment and judging my resilience by the degree of my accomplishment. This transmogrifies an ordinary, developable skill into an attribute of the rarefied few. This is the script of what I referred to yesterday as inspiration porn: ” … overcame a difficult childhood/debilitating disease/life-shattering accident to become a lawyer/doctor/marathon runner/fill in the blank with an accomplishment most of us reading the story couldn’t manage. If I look at what I’ve accomplished (a modest career at a small Masters I university where I’ve made few waves, six novels that I can’t get an agent for/published) I don’t feel very resilient. But if I look at what I’ve survived, and the current quality of my life, I feel very resilient indeed.
If we want people to be resilient, we have to believe that resilience is ordinary, is learnable, is measurable by one’s quality of life and not their level of achievement.
Tag: inspiration porn
Day 6 Reflection: Struggle
I think society needs to be careful about how it views struggle.
Struggle is inevitable. In Genesis, the Judeo-Christian origin myth, struggle results from the fall of Man: By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Genesis 3:19, NIV). Other origin myths describe the struggle between chaos and order, with humans caught between the forces, if not put to the test to choose.
The stories bring us to the modern day, where we try to accomplish small and large things, buffeted by external circumstance, burdened by our frail bodies and our baggage and the injustices of our worlds. Struggle is inevitable.
Society has come to believe that struggle, and particularly succeeding in the face of struggle, ennobles people. This admiration of those who succeed in struggle spawns a phenomenon with a name: Inspiration porn. We read about and praise those people who have “risen above” their struggle: the homeless teen mom who finished college, the paraplegic athlete, the lawyer from the ghetto.
There are many dangers inherent in our idealizing those who have succeeded despite the odds: We make mascots of those who succeed, summarizing them in terms of what they have overcome: “boy from the hood who beat the odds”, “disabled woman who overcame her limitations”, “anyone can become president”.
More harmful, though, is that we absolve ourselves of the work of addressing inequity. We have our shining examples of those who have succeeded; therefore it’s possible to succeed. Or we see our work as nurturing those shining individuals and becoming the hero in our minds.
Our work is to address the inequities that complicate the struggles of everyday people. If one group suffers more than others, there is an inequity. Systemic poverty, inaccessibility, discrimination all exacerbate an individual’s struggles. Those of us whose struggles are minor are not absolved of the need to address these inequities for the sake of our fellows.
One of the biggest inequities is our definition of success, which we define by a model that looks suspiciously upper-class, able-bodied, white, and male. The college graduate we praise chooses a predominantly male profession. The woman with cerebral palsy competes in a traditionally able-bodied marathon. The man who came from a poor black neighborhood who becomes a music mogul is looked at with suspicion by the mainstream. This just increases the struggle for those who are driven by success.
Struggle may be inevitable. Struggle may be ennobling. But struggle should be eased where we can.
Words Like Me 