On August 24th, 2017, to the day exactly two years after a surgery that rendered me paralysed down my left side – and that had one of my medical team hand me a list of nursing homes with the words, “You’ll still have some quality of life there” – I walked on the Great Wall of China.
It was the goal I set, the moment I was told it was considered a “medical improbability” I’d ever walk, work or live independently again.
Achieving that goal was huge, and once I had access to social media again, I posted it on every single platform imaginable. The comments were, predictably, all about how resilient and inspirational I was.
What people saw was a 30-second video of me walking on the Great Wall and triumphantly saying, “I did this,” tears included, at the end of it. They saw me climb this metaphorical rock I set for myself. Very Instagrammable, very resilient.
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What they didn’t see were all the pebbles, mostly again metaphorical, though some very real, that I tripped over in the two years between the surgery and that big moment. The little moments when I wasn’t sure how to keep going, and when walking on the Great Wall seemed nothing but a pipe dream. These were the moments that defined what resilience would look like on this journey, and none of them made it on to social media.
I firmly believe that resilience, like happiness, is a choice, not a skill.
Over the years I’ve heard self-help gurus say that you need to expose yourself to situations of rejection to build your resilience, and I’m just not buying into that. Sure, you don’t learn how to bounce back if you never get rejected, the tide never drags you under, and the music never falters. But that’s only the basics.
During my nine months in hospital, I’ve met people who hardly ever faced any adversities and yet were able and knew how to choose resilience. I also met people who seemed to have hit all the branches on the way down in the tree of misfortune and were the least resilient I’ve ever met. For them, every moment of potential adversity led to days of asking, “Why me?”
Resilience comes out in little things. In moments when we choose to go on, when all we really want to do is stay in bed, crawl under the duvet and hide from the world. Resilience, the kind you have to dig really deep to find, isn’t inspirational. It’s crawling out of a hell you never thought you’d be in. It’s ugly and comes with buckets of tears and unlimited profanity.
Because that’s the other thing; resilience isn’t about being positive and optimistic all the time. Doing that leads only to toxic positivity and research shows that’s actually detrimental to our mental health. Resilience is about embracing all the emotions. It’s about allowing yourself to feel the negative ones, knowing they won’t last, and recognising that they serve a purpose too. Then, choose to believe tomorrow will be better and make it happen.
It means you don’t ask, “Why me?”, because you know there’s no answer to that question. And also, we never ask, “Why me?” when things are going well, so stop asking when they aren’t.
Ask, “What now?”
So often, resilience is about little things in unexpected moments. Like grief that catches you off guard because you see someone who unexpectedly looks like someone you lost. You want to crumble, but instead you decide to keep going. It was a pebble that tripped you up, but you chose resilience and didn’t fall.
In the two years it took me to walk on the Great Wall of China, I chose resilience a hundred times – and have a million times in the eight years since.
Some of these were big rocks I climbed, like going back to work within a year and then coming face-to-face with bigotry and ableism. Some were small pebbles that still have me cussing, for instance, when something turns out to be much harder to do with one hand than it should be (slicing cheese remains a challenge). All of these moments make me a little more resilient, none of them social-media worthy. Because real resilience isn’t a highlight reel.
So next time you drag yourself out of bed when your body aches, or face the day when grief weighs you down, remember this: it doesn’t need to look heroic. Choosing to keep going, however messy or ordinary, is resilience. And that is enough.
The question isn’t whether you’ll trip over pebbles; you will.
The question is whether you’ll choose to get back up.
