The resilience paradox

Coping with grief — but not life.

Here’s two truths:

1. I’m more resilient than I ever believed I could be.
2. I’m less resilient now than ever.

At first glance, these statements look contradictory. But grievers will know what I mean. Here we are, surviving the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to us. The thing that, when we thought about it before it happened, we swore we would never cope with. I’d die without you, we said, and then it happened and we found that actually, we didn’t die. Maybe we wanted to — maybe we even thought about ways of making it happen. But we didn’t. We kept going. Whatever the reason, we kept going.

That’s resilience. That’s resilience like we never imagined we could have, in most cases. Before Mike died I would have described myself as pretty weak. Yes, I’d had some hard times and got through them, but generally I didn’t see myself as a survivor. I cried easily. I relied on Mike a lot to help me deal with life’s ups and downs. Keeping going in the face of adversity wasn’t really something I considered in my wheelhouse.

But then. Then, the thing I said I could never cope with happened. And I… I coped?

I mean, it was, and continues to be, impossibly hard. Agonisingly so, at times. But I’m still putting one foot in front of the other, doing my job, parenting my child, even occasionally having fun. Which has definitely made me have to reassess my assessment of myself. I’m forced to conclude that I — like all grievers — am more resilient than I could ever have imagined.

HOWEVER.

I am also, to put it bluntly, a complete fucking mess. By which I mean the smallest of things can reduce me to rubble. Financial trouble? Panic attack central. Misbehaviour from Lyla? Complete lack of faith in my parenting ability. Annoying email from a co-worker? Rage like you’ve never seen before. Minor disagreement with a friend? Heartbreak. Etc etc. I frequently find myself face down on the sofa sobbing into a pillow about something which, before Mike died, I would have coped with fine.

I was talking to a friend about it the other day — also a griever, and experiencing the very same thing — and we were musing that perhaps losing our people had permanently damaged our ability to be cope with life’s challenges, somehow reduced the amount of resilience we had. 

But actually I don’t think that’s the case.

I think it’s a bit like— 

(yes, there’s a metaphor coming, bear with me — as Jennifer Aniston so legendarily said, “here comes the science bit — concentrate”…)

 — a bucket.

So the bucket is your resilience, and the liquid inside it is stuff — the general life stuff we all have to deal with. When the liquid overflows, that’s when we fall apart — it’s more stuff than we can cope with.

When we lose someone, there’s more stuff than ever. In those early weeks and months you’re constantly in a state of overflow — grief just pouring out all over the place, and as for anything else, forget it — it doesn’t even make it into the bucket at all. 

After a while of this, your brain realises something: the bucket isn’t big enough.

So it makes it bigger. Big enough to hold your grief. 

But then you’re walking around with this almost-full bucket all the time, and the liquid is occasionally slopping over the side, and flip me, it’s heavy.

So when more stuff comes along — an unpaid bill, a stressful meeting, a recalcitrant child — the bucket simply cannot hold it. And what seems like a small thing causes your bucket to overflow, and you fall apart. To an outsider — your boss, your friends, your mortgage advisor (yeah, this one goes out to you, Thomas) it’s an overreaction — completely freaking out over something that should be mildly irritating at most.

And so despite proving that we’re resilient as fuck, we find ourselves lying face down on our beds crying hysterically about interest rates (see Note 1).

And that’s the resilience paradox.

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Notes:

1. Or something like that, idk, that’s just a hypothetical example, I’m not saying I did that very thing just this morning or anything, ahem.