Resilience

won’t you celebrate with me

won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

As a former public school teacher, I confess I initially approached February’s theme with a degree of cynicsm. In the educational sphere, “resilience”—like “grit” and “perseverance,” like “growth mindset,” “character,” and countless other buzzwords—has been embraced as a pedagogical panacea to cure the ills our students face. Administrators especially love these buzzwords, I’ve found, because they put the onus of change on the teachers, not the district—and conveniently, they’re free.

When words like resilience become trendy, their meanings tend to expand until they become shapeless bags, carrying everything and signifying nothing. As a culture, we have also done this to “self-care,” a term which originated in activist circles as a reminder to protect yourself from emotional burnout when fighting injustice, but which has now been co-opted by capitalism to sell bubble bath and essential oils. Self-care is also touted as a solution to our feelings of being overworked, underpaid, and stretched to our limits—not that a bubble bath won’t help in the short term, but no amount of self-care will fix the larger structural issues of unfettered extractive capitalism, economic injustice, and crumbling social support systems.

Similiarly, resilience is an individualistic fix for a larger structural problem. When someone tells me we need to teach kids to be more resilient, my inner cynic hears, “We’re not going to solve any of the problems these kids face, so we’d better teach them how to survive.”

Resilience has a shadow side, too, one that many Midwesterners know well: the impulse to work hard and stay strong and not waste your time with little things like grief. And though we may