On Resilience

I've sat down to write about resilience more times than I can count, and every time, I've gotten stuck. It seemed strange to me, because it's a word people have used to describe me my whole life. They tie it to the adversity I've been through, and to the fact that I'm still standing, still smiling, still determined, still striving. I should have plenty to say.

If you asked me for a definition, I could give you one easily enough: someone who is resilient doesn't quit. They take life's challenges, deal with them, learn the lesson, and keep moving forward in a positive way. They use the hard stuff to become stronger, tougher, wiser, more seasoned.

That's all true. It's also not the reason I kept getting stuck. A definition like that could belong to anyone. It took me a while to realize that the real answer wasn't a definition at all — it was two specific moments. One I watched. One I lived.

What I Watched

My youngest daughter played in a five-game tournament a couple weekends ago. In the first game, she was struggling, and the frustration got to her. The coach pulled her out, and my daughter started crying. Her coach told her plainly: she doesn't deal with crying. My daughter needed to pull herself together and let her know when she was ready.

So, my daughter sat with that. It took her a long time. At one point the coach asked if she was ready. Not yet, she said. The clock kept running. With three minutes left in the game, she finally said she was ready. The coach put her back in.

She made a play that stunned the fans and her own team, it was that good.

She still cried in the car afterward. She told me her coach was mean. She told me she felt like she sucked. Forty minutes later, she had to walk onto the field for the next game, feeling exactly that way.

I told her she had a choice: quit, or go out and do her best.

She got herself together. She played incredible for the next four games.

What strikes me now, looking back on that day, is that the competence and the pain didn't cancel each other out. She wasn't resilient because she stopped feeling bad. She was resilient because she didn't let feeling bad be the last word. Nobody rushed her. She was given the room to say "not yet", TWICE, and the room mattered as much as the push back in. Permission without expectation would have just left her sitting on the bench. Expectation without permission would have taught her to fake it. She got both, and what came out of it was real.

What I Lived

I understand that day so well because I've lived a longer version of it myself.

When I was twenty-two, I became a federal agent. It had been my lifelong dream up to that point, everything in college, my internship, it all had been pointed at it. I was the youngest one in my Federal Law Enforcement Training class. I graduated with a badge and a gun. Life was amazing. That badge wasn't just a job, it was my identity.

A year later, I found out I was pregnant with my son. I was single. This was the 90s, and there weren't many women in my field, let alone young ones, let alone pregnant ones. The kind of work I did — dignitary protection — was not built for a single parent. I decided to keep my baby, and I kept taking the assignments I could for as long as I could. I found care. I moved back in with my mom to get help, because the job's demands didn't bend for anyone.

Before my son turned one, I resigned from the job I had spent my whole life working to get.

I moved to Virginia, took a job that paid more and I didn't have to travel. A year later, 9/11 happened, and I went back to the government.

I made the hard choices over and over, for my son, and later for my other two children, while still serving my country. I could have folded, at almost any point along the way. It would have been easier. I would have been less stressed, less tired. I would have conceded to being half of what I knew I could be.

I didn't. I kept trying to be the best I could, and I kept making the hard choice instead of the easy one.

What They Have in Common

For a long time, I thought resilience and stubbornness might be the same thing wearing different clothes, pulling on the ego. I don't think that anymore. Stubbornness digs in because changing course feels like losing, succumbing to the ego. Resilience keeps going, too, but it's willing to adapt how it keeps going, tempering the ego. My daughter wasn't stubborn when she said "not yet" twice. She was doing the opposite of digging in; she was being honest about where she actually was, so that when she did go back in, it was real. I wasn't stubborn when I walked away from the job I'd built my whole identity around. Stubbornness would have kept me in that role no matter what it cost my son. Resilience was flexible enough to let me change course completely and still call it moving forward.

There is a cost to all of it. I don't think that gets said enough. The cost isn't just hardship you push through, it's the things you give up on purpose because something else matters more. My daughter paid it in a single tournament: the shame of feeling like she sucked, the exhaustion of pulling herself together four separate times in one day. I've paid it across a lifetime: a badge I loved, an identity I'd built, a version of my career I gave up more than once. Both of us had the same door open the whole time: Quit. Neither of us walked through it.

That, I think, is the whole of what resilience is. Not the absence of the hard feeling. Not even winning, necessarily. It's the choice, made again and again, not to let the hard feeling be the final answer. My daughter made that choice in the space of an afternoon, with a coach who wouldn't let her fake it and a mother who told her the choice was hers. I made it over the better part of thirty years, in rooms nobody else ever saw.

Watching her make it, in one game, what took me a lifetime to keep choosing, that might be the proudest kind of resilience there is. Not the kind I built in myself, but the kind I got to watch land in the next generation.