Who Benefits From Calling Me Resilient
They called it resilience so they didn’t have to call it an apology.
My first therapist said it. My second therapist implied it. My father emailed me it. My aunt called me it last week on a catch-up call. My mother in the same breath she calls me strong in. A well-meaning friend said it over wine after I told her what the previous eighteen months had looked like, and I watched her face, like I’ve watched everyone’s face who has called me it before, do the thing faces do when they need to make your survival into something instructive. Something they can learn from. Something that makes the story worth sitting through. Something that makes them feel better.
It’s the kind of word that gets thrown around a lot when people speak about me, about my past, about my life. By people who love me, the people who hurt me, and the people who watched and said nothing. Sometimes all three are the same person. Most of the time, actually.
They say it warmly. Proudly. In passing. Always a compliment, never an apology.
They mean it with admiration, like it’s something I should be proud of.
And the thing is, I know I am resilient. I probably wouldn’t be writing this if I wasn’t. Some people go through things and come out the other end broken. I didn’t, I came out resilient. Which, if you ask me, is just another word for broken, one that makes everyone around you feel better about the things that have happened to you. It’s broken but outwardly fine or at least fine enough that people don’t notice.
The reality is I didn’t recover or adjust to the misfortune, not really. Everything impacted me, everything changed me, everything that happened hurt, everything stayed with me. But I survived, and in that survival I kept going. I know not everyone does. Some people come out the other side and can’t. Broken in a way that is clear and obvious to the people around them.
I’m not stronger than the people who didn’t make it out resilient. I just coped differently, wear the pain differently. The damage was there. Is there. Will probably always be there in some form. It just never looked like damage to the people around me.
And that’s the thing about resilience, it is incredibly convenient for everyone except the person who is it. Because if I’m resilient, nobody has to deal with what made me that way. They can go on thinking I moved past it as easily as they did.
I’ve been called resilient many times throughout my life. This month alone, three times.
My mother called me resilient when she got worried after I broke down on a call with her. She wasn’t worried that I was struggling with money, or with work, or with what comes next as I watched everything I had built go down in flames. She was worried because, in her words, I never break. I’m the strong one. So it must really be bad, if she only knew.
Then there was my father, who I hadn’t spoken to in years. He sent me an email about how lovely it was getting to know me again. In it, he wrote that he always knew I was resilient, but that seeing it now that I was grown was amazing.
Most recently, my aunt said it in passing when I told her I was moving somewhere new. You’ve always been so resilient, she said. So I know you’ll have an amazing time.
Three people. The same word. Said warmly, said proudly, said like it's a good thing.
And it is, for them.
Because if I’m resilient, it lets them off the hook.
It wraps the story up neatly. The outcome becomes the whole narrative and everything that came before it quietly disappears. Not because it didn’t happen, but because you somehow came out stronger on the other end. You kept living.
To the people who call me resilient, I become the living embodiment of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Or, I guess, in this context, what doesn’t kill you makes you resilient.
And that’s a good thing. So it’s good of them not to offer help. They don’t need to go out of their way for my sake – “she’ll be fine, she’s resilient”, they’ll tell themselves as they go on with their day.
In my opinion, what didn’t kill me made me someone who needs to watch a dot bounce back and forth across a screen while my EMDR therapist asks me about childhood trauma. But nonetheless, when you are someone who prevailed, people like to label you as something that absolves them of what you went through. Something that wraps it all up in a tiny box with a nice bow on it.
My father wasn’t there for most of the years that made me the resilient one. He missed them, making them harder by not being there. And now he gets to read the final chapter and call it amazing. He gets to be proud of who I became without ever having to know what it took for me to get here. In fact, I bet he thinks it’s a good thing he left because I wouldn’t be so resilient now. He can even take the credit for creating such a strong, resilient daughter.
My mother was there. She caused more trauma than she knows, and my resilience means she never has to acknowledge it or even see it. She never has to ask what it cost me. Never has to sit with her own role in any of it. Never has to look in the mirror and question her own actions.
Because I’m fine, I turned out fine. So that must mean she did a good job.
And my aunt gets to move on too from what she ignored. She gets to hear that I’m doing interesting new things and feel nothing but happiness for me. You’ve always been so resilient.
A sentence that closes every door that could have been left open.
No harder questions required. No looking back necessary. Just happiness, and pride, and the clean conscience of someone who watched and said nothing and was never asked to do otherwise. Because I turned out okay or at least it looks like I did.
That might be the worst thing about resilience. Not that it means you survived, but that everyone gets to mistake your survival for proof that you were never really hurt. My resilience is the silence that makes all of this possible.
It is the word that means we never have to talk about it. And we never do.
So I survived whatever I survived. None of it matters now, apparently, because here I am strong, resilient, moving forward with my life.
I guess the conclusion I’ve come to is that my resilience was never really about me, it was about the people closest to me who benefited from it. So they could watch me survive and feel better about what happened. So they could call me strong instead of asking what broke me. So they could be proud of who I became without having to think too hard about who I had to become to get here. It’s the lie they tell themselves so they can cope, so they could move on.