Think resilience wears a cape?

Reimagining forward motion when leaping tall buildings isn't an option.

You’ve hit a tough spot in the road. Maybe you’ve been here for a while. The voice in your head is doing you no favors. It keeps reminding you of your friend so-and-so who experienced something similar and seems to have sailed right through it. Or at least kept her hair combed and wore matching shoes.

You’ve read books, listened to podcasts, and taped an acronym to your bathroom mirror about those positive vibes everyone’s talking about. And you’re exhausted. Frustrated. Disappointed in yourself.

The question keeps surfacing — “Why am I not further down the road by now?”

Hear me out. The books and stories and podcasts—even a measured dose of the “positive vibes only”—is not a bad thing in and of itself. And in fact, they can prop us up in important ways. BUT…superimposing someone else’s story on our own does not serve us. The hard work of resilience comes in different shapes. Yours has a shape of its own.

The brain injury survivors I work with moved me to rethink my ideas about the shape of resilience—about forward motion when motion itself feels unreachable.

I used to wonder, “What makes the difference between those who seem to demonstrate resilience and those who don’t?”

Now I think I had the wrong question.

First, let’s talk about this idea of resilience. Resilience is generally defined as the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. I like to think of it in simpler terms — as forward motion despite difficulty. The part no one wants to say out loud (you know AI didn’t write this because it would most certainly say “the quiet part”) is that some people do not choose forward motion. Resilience is not an innate trait or universal way of being. It is easier to take a pass than to take the next small step. Some people choose the pass. I won’t minimize the hard-won forward motion of those who are choosing to show up in their lives by calling everyone with a pulse and a hard story “resilient.” So now that I’ve laid the groundwork and perhaps ticked some people off...

My concept of resilience has been shaped and reshaped by experience and by observation. I can say confidently, I’ve lived long enough now to know that there are few outright evergreen assertions I can make about resilience that will apply to every person in all situations. Human suffering in the form of chronic pain, emotional pain, trauma —all of it — refuses to submit to universal constructs and theories.

I work with people who live with significant, often lifelong, impacts of traumatic brain injury, from lost limbs to faulty memories to chronic pain to depths of depression and anxiety they had never known before their brain injuries. People whose brain injury has led to such anxiety, they no longer feel able to engage in the very relationships that could benefit them the most.

To begin to answer that, there’s a saying in my world, “If you’ve seen one person with brain injury...you’ve seen one person with brain injury.” Two people can be diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and appear completely different. By the way, that term “mild traumatic brain injury” is laughable. Nothing feels mild about forgetting your daughter’s birthday or the disorienting experience of chronically not feeling like oneself.

Back to our two people. Same mTBI diagnosis. On paper, they have the same deficits.

One gets up and starts trying to figure things out for the day.

The other cannot fathom putting feet on the ground.

One says, “Yes, my life has been impacted by this injury, and I’m not going to let it define me.”

The other says, “I can barely function.”

The differences in context could be stark and dramatic: little social support, logistical barriers to treatment, financial strain, comorbid conditions, just to name the obvious. Even when we account for all of that, even when context is as favorable as it gets, the gap remains. How can we approach the concept of resilience in a way that honors both their realities? What makes the idea of resilience real and meaningful and also accessible?

The person who says, “I won’t let this define me,” and the person who is still in the thick of mourning the loss of who they were — they may both be doing the most resilient thing available to them right now. The question then becomes, “What is the next available step for me today?” Not “Why am I not bouncing back?” but rather “What is the one thing in front of me right now that I can do?”

Sometimes that’s a therapy exercise. Sometimes it’s a phone call. Sometimes it’s just brushing your teeth.

The resilience is in the choosing to choose the next small step. The forward motion that is available. It is the one-step-at-a-time movement when the wind is blowing head on. Watching brain injury survivors navigate this reality has taught me something about resilience that no textbook could—that sometimes the forward motion is simply choosing to show up to another day that looks exactly like the hard one before it.

For that person, resilience might look like answering one text after days or weeks of isolation. Or walking to the mailbox when it means using a walker they wish they didn’t need. Or just deciding to eat a warm nourishing meal rather than the quickest thing to grab in the pantry. That is forward motion. The next small step.

The next sacred small step is not a motivational concept. It is a framework, a philosophy if you will, that I did not invent. It’s not new or revolutionary. I have simply discovered it as an unexpected pattern from my rearview mirror as I’ve navigated my own hard, sometimes devastating, seasons. It is a heroic pattern I have witnessed in the lives of so many of my fellow bereaved moms. And it is a clinical reality I have watched play out week after week with the people in my brain injury support groups.

The next small step.

That is resilience with a cape on.