Resilience: A Life’s Work

Using pain and loss to fuel your personal revolution

In its own mysterious way, I suppose writing is, itself, an act of resilience.

It is July 1, 2015. My alarm goes off. I am both awake and asleep. The gentle, familiar tone drones on as I struggle to open my eyes, now swollen and crusted-shut. This is the only moment of peace I will feel that day — the moment when I’ve forgotten that my father and soulmate has just died unexpectedly at the age of 61.

Three years later, I am on the verge of ending a relationship that I have intuitively known isn’t right for me for a long time, despite my valiant fight to preserve it. It is midday. The hot summer sun is strong, spilling out in neatly patterned streaks across the ceiling.

I feel so utterly hopeless as I listen to the laughter of children playing outside; the contrast is implausible. I sob for this new sense of loss, this fresh, anticipatory grief for a fractured future. All I want to do is to be able to call my dad. Hands shaking, I dial the suicide hotline.

I reluctantly load the remainder of my belongings into my car and wonder, “Will he notice this is gone, that I’m gone?” Or worse, “Am I breaking his heart?” I rest on the couch to catch my breath. The person I hoped I would spend my life with sits down beside me, lays his heavy head on my shoulder, and begins to cry. I’ve waited months for his tears to arrive; they are unexpectedly warm. I place my hand on his head and whisper, “I know.”

My brittle knees hit the floor as I gaze into our dog’s big caramel eyes, remembering him as a helpless puppy, asleep in my arms. I tell him that I will always love him; I know he’s unaware of what’s happening, but I fear it just the same. Then, somehow, I leave.

Eventually, I no longer cry myself to sleep at night. I settle into my new life and fall hard and fast for a charming stranger who promises me the world. I take my perch upon a precariously high pedestal. Impulsively, I risk my career, apartment, and sense of self as I spend the summer blindly following “the one” around the country. Inevitably, his mask falls away in a quick and ungracious descent. I am sharing a bed with Jekyll and Hyde. Soon, my flaws are on trial — the prosecution is ruthless.

The bruise on my arm is so pronounced that the woman working at the jewelry store whisks me aside in a safe moment to ask if I’m okay. “Of course,” I say. I will not allow myself to believe he is anything less than perfect. It is my turn to be happy.

Then, on what was to be a brief trip home, five impossibly heavy boxes containing my suitcases and all of my belongings arrive at my door unannounced. This is how I learn that I will not be moving to California, that there is no happily ever after, that I have recklessly squandered my heart for a callous monster.

Weeping and ashamed, I remove my underwear, picture frames, “Sausalito” sweatshirt, and toiletries from the boxes, marveling at how carefully he folded each and every piece of me. How cold must a heart be to pack someone away like that? I barely make it to the toilet to vomit.

With my head bowed in the most undignified fashion, my intuition waves a parade of bright red flags as if to say, “I told you so.” I’m not entirely certain if I’m laughing or crying, but against the cold tile of the bathroom floor, I vow that this will be the last time I defy my inner compass. How will I survive this?

And then, one day, it clicks. I can survive it. All of it.

I refer to this as the “miracle moment” because that’s exactly how it felt — divine, a gift from God, the loving hand of my father resting in mine. What was once murky and dark was suddenly clear and unmistakable: with time and experience, I had learned to navigate loss with strength and grace. I understood the transience of pain.

I would soon take the remnants of my shattered relationship and redefine them as the birthplace of an entirely new way of perceiving and living life. This “failure” was a perfectly-timed opportunity to extend love and compassion toward myself. Reframing the burning landscape as fertile soil for growth was an act of heart-fueled rebellion.

Resilience grows in the space you make for it as a function of your relationship with yourself — the most important relationship of your life. Self-knowledge, self-compassion and self-love are the cornerstones of resilience and require purposeful cultivation. Prioritizing your inner world is, perhaps, the greatest challenge and most radical act of love in the never-ending growth process we call life.

And while resilience is a powerful tool for navigating life, it is not a preventive mechanism. Changing tides will knock you off-course. Pain will surface — again and again and again. You will lose people you love. You will fall in love with people who don’t love you back — or can’t. You might lose your job, your home, your sense of security, your youthful complexion. You will make hard choices and you will let people down.

And you will inevitably slip into familiar, self-sabotaging patterns: self-critical thinking, believing you’re not good enough, settling for less than what you deserve.

How detrimental to mistake self-criticism for truth. How disheartening to believe you are anything less than more than enough. How painful to settle.

My hope for you is that you will experience life as an awakening — a becoming. I hope you are flooded with appreciation and awe. I hope one day you will meet your own eyes in the mirror and burst into tears of joy and relief because you’ve come so far and you almost can’t believe it. I hope you struggle to catch your breath, amazed at your own strength, in utter disbelief of how much you’ve endured.

I hope you are profoundly proud of how adept you’ve become at soothing yourself and allowing yourself to feel the peace you so desperately deserve. I hope you learn to love yourself over a long period of time and also in your own “miracle moment.” I hope you will hold yourself in your own hands and that it will feel like coming home. I hope you will be patient and gentle as you mend and grow. I hope you will frequently remind yourself that healing is a long game.

Thirty years have gone by. I sit in an Adirondack chair, overlooking a pristine lake, with a quiet mind and a sense of wonder — for the breathtaking scenery, and for the collection of heartbeats that carved the path to this place of peace. If I’m truly blessed, the person who was worth waiting for sits beside me, watching me as I look out at the water (he’s been doing this for years and still doesn’t know that I know when his eyes are locked on me).

My past is far from here; the present moment is all that matters to me now. I hum a familiar song and feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for each and every tear, misstep, and promise made on the bathroom floor. Two majestic German Shepherds lay lovingly and submissively on the deck, lapping at my well-traveled feet.