The idea of resilience is not new, but it’s taken on a new potency. Aid is urgent; resilience takes time to build – and therefore lasts. Time is what we can expect to continue to put into creating the deep changes in social-economic relationships, markets and sourcing, and policies which influence the conditions of our lives.
We’re in a collective moment of transition and trauma – living in a time of rapid austerity impacting both jobs and institutional social safety nets; deep polarization, hatefulness and fake science impacting policies; the introduction of internment camps; climate events…
In a moment like this, as a social historian, working class babe, and middle-aged queer, I look backwards in time knowing the world has been terrible to live in before. I look to the wisdom of the people, both blood and spirit, whom I come from, who survived poverty, scorn, disrupted relationship, and limited opportunities for safety.
“I am the history of the rejection of who I am.” ― June Jordan
“Mir veln zey iberlebn” eg, “We will outlive them.” – 1930s Yiddishism
“[The european witch hunts] involved a historic battle against anything posing a limit to the full exploitation of the laborer, starting with the web of relations that tied the individuals to the natural world, to other people, and to their own bodies.” ― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women
Our lives have been made dire many times, many ways, and yet so many of us survive with our fight intact.
And, as a system designer – I look at the design of systems and inquire as to where the injection of fear is coming from, why it’s so painful, and where there might be tiny little fractures we can exploit to get around it.
There are absolutely things to be worried or fearful about.
But when fear builds, it gets leaky. Fear starts to show up in places it doesn’t belong. One might start to feel groundless and fear that it’s never safe anytime, anywhere. This leaky feeling is devastating, and it’s a designed part of the systems we’re in: the more fear leaks, the less we can do.
Conversely, the more we can stop the leaks — fear where it counts, grow and live where we can, observe and nourish the bounce back, however bruised – we create resilience.
“If you live in a society that wishes you didn’t exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible.” – Patrick Califia, Macho Sluts 2009 ed.
“Being despised is very hard to survive as a child, but once you don’t die you gain a kind of resilience.” ― Dorothy Alison
“Things which do not grow and change are dead things.” – Louise Erdrich
Resilience is a resourced belief
Something I notice in clients and the world at large is how fear connects to us feeling like we aren’t safe, and this creates a void into which some people pile money anxieties: if only there were more money… I’d have enough to be safe… forever.
This isn’t a real solution, but it sure feels like it could be, and it is a trap from which even the wisest among us get stuck. While of course some savings is wise, there is no bucket of money that can save you from the world. You have to experience it and bring yourself to it, and the ways you think about what – and who – resources you in this task matter a lot.
I’m thinking about doing a workshop in the next month or two on this topic – comment if you think it’s a good idea! Or, check out some of the writing and videos I’ve done on the topic so far:
NEW Watch: Fighting Off Fear about Scarcity [when you already have money]
Feeling like you have “enough” is about a relationship to what you believe will help ensure you are cared for. That belief is what creates confidence about your personal security, not a number in the bank.
2023, Read: How Can You Imagine Having Enough?, “How twisted it is that a good thing, having enough, is also “bad” – or maybe makes you bad, or is something that turns good people bad. How sad that we then shy away from living or even imagining enough.”
2021, Watch: On Desire & Enough, “Where on the scale between manufactured consumer desire and fear-based asceticism do you find yourself today? How do you know, and what do you decide based on it?”