Rising resilient
When I was 5 years old, my mom signed me and my brother up for swim lessons. With each stroke, I was getting closer to competing in the Summer Olympics, or so I thought. At the end of the year, each swimmer received a medal and the name of the fish school we would progress to. The swim instructor explained to my mom that my older brother could progress to “Sharks” but I would benefit from another year as a “Guppy”. I was having none of it. If I couldn’t progress with him, I wasn’t going to stay back. So, I quit. Surprisingly, my mom let me. A great start to resilience.
Recently, the idea of a “Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset” has become better known, thanks to the work of Stanford professor Carol Dweck. She explains that we either see our talents, intelligence, and skills as natural aptitudes that should not require practice (fixed mindset) or as muscles that require practice to develop (growth mindset). With a fixed mindset, we are afraid to try something outside our comfort zone because it might reveal we’re actually no good at ballet or baking or badminton. But with growth mindset, everything becomes possible and if practice is difficult, it means I am improving.
obstacles to our goal
Somehow I must have learned a little of this belief in the years after my Guppy episode. When I began my Masters degree in Comparative Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, I felt very out of place. My internalised expectations of a postgraduate degree, the lack of focus of the course, the seeming apathy of the other students, the detached attitude of the lecturers, and the marginalised content made it a soul draining experience. After 3 weeks of disappointment and confusion, I tried to transfer into the more appealing Masters in Children’s Literature. I went into the meeting with the Children’s Lit lecturer and, perspiring profusely, made my case as to how the MPhil I was doing did not meet my expectations and why I should be eligible for an internal transfer. The lecturer listened sympathetically but ultimately said no. The course was full and I had not been accepted into it. I left his office dejected and even more than that, embarrassed. My only remaining option was to drop out of the Masters but because I saw it as a necessary stepping stone on my way to a PhD in English, if I dropped out, I would be abandoning the long term goal I was pursuing.
Instead, I started searching for insight. A random and desperate article search about the point of literature brought me to a journal article about the ethical power of stories. Following the links in the author’s biography, I discovered his personal website which told his story—a man who had grown up in an abusive family environment with limited academic ambition, worked 4 jobs including on the railroad, and ultimately earned his PhD in English and went on to teach university students to understand how stories can change us.
Realising I had nothing to lose, I emailed him. I told him how miserable I was, how disappointed I was with my postgraduate studies, how I had no mentors, how what I had hoped to study—the beauty of words and ideas in literature—had been drained down to identity politics, how I did not know what to read anymore, and how I felt deflated in my whole academic journey. To my surprise, a few days later he emailed me back. A genuinely concerned and guiding email of what to read, what really mattered in literature, a link to his new book, the names of other authors, attached articles he had written, and some overall life lessons. We began a lovely correspondence and the more I read of him and his work, the more I realised I had found not only a life line, but the approach I would bring into my PhD. That professor, Marshall Gregory, was a crossroads for me. I could have given up and walked away, but instead he inspired me not only to stay the course but to carve out my own course.
Hope and Resilience
About the same time, I read the following line from Dante’s Purgatorio when Virgil is leading Dante up the mountain towards Paradise and Dante is contemplating giving up: “By his question, he so threaded the needle of my desire that with the very hope he made my thirst less parching.”
Hope and resilience go hand in hand. Hope believes there is a why to discover behind what I am doing or what I am suffering through. It helps me to identify the goal for which I am willing to fight. Resilience only makes sense when I have an end goal in mind. When I lose that why, that purpose, or that goal, I lose any longing to keep fighting for something or towards something.
One of my favourite college lecturers used to talk about whether characters in the novels we were reading had “agency.” I had no idea what he was talking about until he explained agency as the power to make choices that direct your life, something I now understand as freedom: the freedom to take control of my life and through my choices to steer it one way or another. Without this agency, as that lecturer explained, we are passive reactors and someone or something else directs our life for us. But, I’ve learned that life is not always as black and white as I saw it in college and that agency is not automatic; it’s something I have to opt for because it’s very easy to hand over our agency to someone else.
Life includes hiccups, bumps along the way, difficulties, and it’s only by expecting them that I can use them to my advantage. Now, when something challenging crops up, it’s more like, “Oh there you are” rather than “Why is this happening, life should be easy!” The latter attitude can cause me to pull back, refuse to engage with life, to give up my agency.
Resilient Women
A few books I read recently all offer stories of resilient women: Educated by Tara Westover, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza are three memoirs of young women in extremely difficult situations. Dysfunctional families, their own defeatist internal voices, genocide, misunderstandings, lack of support. But these three women each had something they were pursuing—interior freedom, education, survival—and with that end goal in mind they knew that amidst awful circumstances that would have made all of us feel like a victim, every choice they made was shaping themselves. Choices of what to avoid, leave behind, go towards, say yes to, say no to, defend, fight for.
We lose resilience when we lose sight of our goal. If I could encapsulate resilience, I would say: have a goal, get help—it really helps to have someone else believe in you too—find a mentor who can challenge and encourage you, take time to re-evaluate how your choices are bringing you closer to your goal (or not), and always believe that there is a way forward. You have that agency. So do I. The freedom to make choices for myself that shape my life, my character, and my very desire.