I’VE BEEN thinking a lot about resilience

I'm back!

Taking a couple of weeks off was a must as we packed up our apartment and moved out for our (now ongoing) renovation project — and I so appreciate your patience!

Today, I want to talk about resilience. 

I think for disabled people, the relationship with resilience is a complex one. 

In a lot of ways, we don't have a choice but to be resilient. 

We have to rely on resilience to navigate diagnoses or or adapt to a completely different reality post injury or diagnosis. The alternative, really, is to not live at all. 

Living life as a disabled individual in a world that still isn't designed for us is an act of resilience. We constantly have to go out into the world with our armour. 

For me, this has meant building a really strong “anticipatory” capability. What I mean by that is that I go out into the world knowing very well that something can (and most likely will) be inaccessible to me or difficult to navigate. Having this lens on means that I can better manage my disappointment when things do go wrong, and I'm better able to let things just roll off and not hurt. 

It's a protective mechanism. Another form of resilience.

Like with many things, there's a double-edged-swordness to this concept. 

When I rely too much on this built-in resilience, it can get in the way of:

a) me being able to call out and identify the things that are hard and burdensome to me, and 

b) asking for help and therefore making stronger connections within my existing relationships. 

For example, something I realize I do — and this may be true for a lot of disabled peeps — is take on a lot of the admin tasks that are impacted by my specific needs as a wheelchair user.

When we were looking for a place to live in during our renovation, I naturally gave myself the task to look for apartments we could live in. What I only half realized at the time is that I was doing this because my accessibility needs directly impacted where we could and couldn't live. Because of this, I was directly exposing myself to the potential rejection and inaccessibility I knew would come.

Rather than share the responsibility of finding something that would meet my needs with my husband, I took the brunt of it. And somehow I was still surprised when I felt sad and frustrated and overwhelmed when it turned out to not be easy.

In the words of my therapist, I choose to take on these responsibilities to save other people from the work it takes to just exist in a disabled body. And then I don't give myself the space to admit that it's hard and that I could actually benefit from sharing the burden.

Still letting that sink in. But I figured I would share because I so often focus on the joy that exists for disabled people. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot of hurt that exists too.

We continually live in the both/and, as disabled people. And I think lessening some of that need for resilience would allow us to embody more of the ease and softness that is so often lacking in our experiences. (This is as much a reminder for me as it is for anyone else!) 

I'd love to hear from any of you on what your relationship with resilience is. My inbox is always open.