Resilience Looks Like Many Things
How resilient are you?
How has it changed over time?
I’ve noticed my own emotional and psychological resilience has increased as I’ve aged. Things I struggled with in the past seem to affect me less and this is played out in the research. While our physical resilience naturally declines, emotional resilience increases as we mature.
Studies like the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) followed nearly 7000 people over 17 years and found older adults in England exhibit resilience in the face of significant life changes, such as bereavement, retirement, and hospital stays. Overall, the study found that people’s mental health did not worsen after any of the events. In fact, depression improved after some of them..
So all this makes sense and perhaps we can see it in ourselves or older loved ones around us.
However, I’m also curious about the length of time I have needed - need - to fully return to my buoyant, energised Self when hard things happen.
And I think it’s summed up in noticing I’m no longer willing to cover up or mask the truth of how I'm feeling.
Does this resonate with you too?
If you’re also a peri or post-menopausal woman there may be some familiarity to this? Menopause is often accompanied by a loss of desire to compromise… but I think it might be more than this. And I certainly don’t think it’s exclusively about gender.
My experience this spring, of sitting with a loved one - uncertain whether they would live or die is not unique to me.
The worry, fears, anticipated grief, frustration at not knowing what was happening, desire to control outcomes beyond my control - all this is not unique to me.
It’s all deeply, irrevocably human. It’s part of our shared experience.
And so I’ve been profoundly curious watching the process I’ve gone through - both during and after those worrying few weeks.
Girlfriends who know me and Anton - who excels in these kinds of situations - have been checking in with me, acknowledging the tiredness and exhaustion that accompanied the days (and weeks) that followed. In some ways they’ve been my guide, my reminder that it is ok to feel how I’ve been feeling.
Depleted.
My reserve bank looking a little empty - a flag that I’d been over-borrowing from my future Self.
This concept of ‘borrowing from our future Self’ in times of difficulty is one I first heard from a podcast guest many years ago as he spoke about the death of his father. It resonated so deeply with me - and spoke to those times I had done the same. Times of burnout from work, grief from the loss of dear, dear loved ones, times of wild anxiety from stress or worry about things I couldn’t control in my own life or the lives of those I loved.
The phrase resonated.
And it speaks to something I’ve often thought about. This idea that we all have a Self-Care Bank. Like the best bank in the world it’s one we can pay into, and take from each day. We can invest in it over time and then reap longer-term dividends. And we can borrow against future investments.
The challenge is that even with this bank of our own making - one that is only here for us - we can empty it’s reserves. Like those desperate stories from the 1930s and scenes from films like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, we can make a run on our own Self-Care Bank. And leave it empty.
That’s when we burnout.
We do it by not honouring our need to replenish and restore our reserves.
We do it by covering up what we’re really feeling and just ploughing back into the world without a care for our Self as we are today - or the impact it will have on our future Self.
It’s an act of carelessness that is profoundly human. Normal. And one that’s often celebrated.
We call it resilience.
Or work ethic.
Or commitment.
And often it feels we have absolutely no choice at all.
When my mother was dying I accepted an incredible new role.
A promotion to head up a team responsible for a multi-million pound budget. The work we were charged to deliver was exciting, scary, out of my comfort zone and utterly absorbing.
I thought it might be just what I needed to get through the grief and pain I was feeling, and rightly anticipated was just going to get worse.
And in some ways perhaps it was.
I worked with wonderful people who showed me enormous kindness at times when I struggled. The company itself treated me well when I finally broke apart. And I learnt SO much through the experience that I truly wouldn’t be as good at what I do now without those learnings.
And.
And it made me so ill I nearly died.
It exhausted every single cell in my body so I thought I had nothing left. I thought joy had deserted me and would never return.
This isn’t the job’s fault of course. The job was just the job. Doing what it needed to do to ensure the system it supported was well fed.
The responsibility for my actions lay with me. And it came from a lack of willingness to acknowledge what I was really feeling - and a belief that I just had to go on. And on. And on.
There were many things that contributed to that time, just as there is more than one layer to what I’ve been noticing over the past few weeks.
Life is nuanced and delicate and multi-faceted. And so are we, if we allow ourselves to be.
Yesterday I sent a text to a friend ‘I just felt myself return’.
It’s not that I haven’t been here. I have.
What I meant was that the part of me that I’d felt I needed to hold back, in safety and comfort, now felt ready to step back into the world again. I call her Joy.
She is the very heart of me. She is part of my tiny tattoo that I have on my foot and she has accompanied me throughout the whole of my life. My protector and the part I sometimes still feel I most need to protect.
I recognise there is more Work for me to do here. It is ever-ongoing this art of learning about ourselves - it’s what makes this work so intriguing and rewarding. I believe in asking for support where it’s needed and I’m working with someone I trust to help me disentangle the hidden knot that’s been revealed through this observation of my own process. Not because I need fixing or that there is something wrong with the process I’ve been honouring - simply that in the process I have observed something that is asking for my kindest attention. And it feels the greatest gift I can give my Self to attend to that request.
And so, all of these thoughts, how do they coalesce around this idea of resilience and aging?
My reflection is this:
That it is with the deep inner work, the profound knowing of ourselves, that we are able to truly understand our needs, so we no longer diminish ourselves and deplete our reserves of energy in the name of outdated beliefs about how we should show up.
So, as we age, our emotional and psychological resilience may not appear as brushing things off lightly and just getting on. It may instead appear as the courage and bravery to truly acknowledge what we have been through and allow it to process in its own time, in order that we can step forward with the new wisdom gained, fully integrated. So can add it to our own Wonderful Life’s work - knowing it will continue to support us… until that time it is no longer needed.
Curiously since my loved one left hospital, I’ve uncovered a series of poems.
Some written to and by my mother while she was ill, and some written by me over the past many years. They all seem to speak to this wisdom in some way. I love it when that happens. This insight we have always held, leaking out into the world, yet it’s only many years later we can truly see it was ours to own.
I’d like to share one from my mother, Bibby, a wonderful complex beautiful fiercely intelligent woman who loved us all so much.
For Henny
My daughter, aged two, had never enough
Of my reading to her Billy-goats Gruff.
In the mornings, she'd climb into my bed
And always, always, the same words she said.
She'd open the page of the frightening book,
Then shut it again — a very quick look
At the monster who lived under the plank
Over the river where the slimy weeds stank.
'Velly fuffy mon-mon', she said so bravely
Knowing that I would answer her gravely.
'It's only a picture, he doesn't really exist'
— My reward was being ecstatically kissed.
We agreed he was nasty, a menace in fact,
But actually that was her first put-on act:
She was scared, she was brave, she didn't run,
Instead we made it a huge bit of fun.
Now she is grown, herself a mother,
But still she faces the vultures that hover,
Demons that lurk in the bottomless pit —
But I'll tell you, now, she can deal with that shit!
5/4/14
So. There we are. She was right, of course. But the way I deal with difficulty now is so very very different to how I dealt with things before.
If you find you are masking your true Self, or feeling you’re needing to perform, remember… this may be an old pattern you learnt when you were very small. Something some very clever part of you realised could keep you safe - at a time when your resources were limited, simply by the fact of being a child in an adult world. And so you gathered evidence to support that strategy and prove its efficacy and, understandably, kept playing it out and playing it out… until, maybe, it’s begun to feel outdated, as though it’s no longer the wisest path for you.
Or if you notice your reserves are depleted, that you’re close to emptying your own Self-Care Bank - perhaps because you have no energy left for the things that restore you and keep your account topped up, remember… even noticing this can be part of how you begin to shift the outlay. Self-awareness with self-compassion is our most powerful asset because it helps us see the truth of our experience. Not so it exhausts us further and we collapse under it, but so we can also see the tiny steps we can take to change things in some small way for the better - whatever better might mean for you right now.
Or if you’re worried that you need to be more resilient, or you shouldn’t be feeling so tired despite the energy grief or worry is taking from you, or if there’s a voice telling you ‘you need to buck-up’, remember… listen to it all kindly. And let it know you understand this drive to get on and that you won’t always feel this way. Hold the tiredness, the sadness, the worry with compassion and remember this too shall pass. There’s a reason those words have clung in our collective consciousness. They hold undeniable truth.
These behaviours and patterns and beliefs can change, if that is what you would like to do.
Like everything in life, it’s a process. Not something that needs to be rushed at or ignored. Simply faced with kindness and curiosity and calm. If you’d like someone to walk beside you while you navigate whatever you’re facing, or would love to change, you know I’m here.
Lastly.
If you heard the episodes I recorded from hospital (this season, episodes 4 and 5 I think) then I’ll soon be sharing something that accompanied me through those days. A form of medicine for an aching heart. And if you’ve been receiving the everyday compassion emails — you’ll be the first to hear what emerged.
To hear this episode, you can find the Henny Flynn podcast anywhere you love to listen or you can listen here
And to receive the weekly messages of everyday compassion, find out more and sign-up here