Resilience Is Not an Inner Strength
Here’s why our efforts to hack this quality will never work
When I first got divorced, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to make ends meet. I had sole custody of my kids, no child support, and attorney fees five times the piddly amount in my new separate bank account. I was drowning in stress, and it showed. When I showered, a small mammal’s worth of hair clogged up the drain.
That was two years ago. Today, my divorce fees are paid off, my kids and I host community potlucks, and I’m working to become a licensed social worker. On one recent night, after my shower, I stuck the strands of hair that fell out of my head onto the wall and counted them. There were only seven.
It would be easy to read this and conclude something profound about the power of resilience. After all, in the face of adversity, I was able to adapt, draw up my inner strength, and learn to thrive. Our culture loves stories like this. We put resilience up on a pedestal, combing through self-help articles for ways to build it in ourselves, in our children, and in our companies. We believe that survivors are the ones who powered through, who muscled their problems out of the way (the unspoken implication, of course, being that those who continue to struggle simply couldn’t hack it).
