Reframing Resiliency towards Relations
The word and concept of resiliency can and often holds a lot and a different kind of weight for those of us with (multiple) non-dominant identities and parts. Resiliency is multi-layered, nuanced, and complex.
Resilience is “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors” (American Psychological Association).
I cannot keep up with the number of times I myself or those I’m in relationship with have been applauded for our resilience. For our ability to preserve through something stressful or traumatic. For our ability to get through it. In my latest blog post on code-switching, I explain how the skill of code-switching may actually be a way many of us have moved through stressful or traumatic moments. In other words, code-switching has afforded many of us to enhance our resiliency. Being called resilient was something I historically felt so proud to be called. As I continue on this journey, I find being called resilient to leave a taste in my mouth and sensation in my body that feels salty and disconnected from Love and Kinship.
I’ve witnessed and experienced how being called to be resilient equates to “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or to return to a particular baseline as quickly as possible. So, what happens when this “baseline” throws us back into operating within the status quo and is what is creating harm for your Self and/or others?
And how much resilience is required of us, our children, one another to survive this world? What are the norms and cultures we can creatively shift we must pivot so that our children, our friends, and colleagues are not needing to consistently face adversity, trauma, significant stress in our communities? Resiliency shouldn’t just be code for how well you can “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”
WE MUST HAVE WAYS OF BEING AND PRACTICES IN RESILIENCY IN ORDER TO ABANDON & REBUILD THE STRUCTURES THAT REQUIRE US TO RELY ON SO MUCH RESILIENCY IN THE FIRST PLACE. We don’t want to find ourselves over-relying on concepts of resiliency. When we also need to be abandoning and rebuilding the structures that require us to exhibit and posture so much resiliency.
We want to invest in ourselves and one another in a way so that resiliency skills and tools are not just these external practices outside of ourselves, outside of our workspaces, classrooms, etc, but actually woven into the fabric of who we are internally, interpersonally, structurally. WE MUST EMBODY THEM to be relationally resilient with one another.
In order to continue on our paths and movements towards justice, liberation, and love, resiliency can support us in shifting, abandoning, rebuilding the structures (and even relationships) that cause us/one another harm. We have to be careful that the end goal doesn’t become resiliency to simply survive these harmful systems and relationships.
I invite us all push and question the status quo and say we can EMBODY this relational resiliency not just by individual body movement practices, but by also examining ourselves and relationships in our communities and world. Over the next several months I will be sharing and exploring concepts of connection, collaboration, capacity, and change as an invitation to embody and invite relational resiliency into our lives. I hope you will join me as we explore these 4 C’s and how when practiced, can allow for enhanced collective relations.