On Resilience and the Labor of Continuing

I’ve been taught a lot about resilience.

It’s a buzzword now — built into wellness curricula, baked into institutional language, handed out like a balm for burnout. We’re offered resiliency toolkits and mindfulness apps, taught breathing exercises and positive reframing. The idea is that if we just regulate our emotions well enough, we can withstand anything.

In theory, it’s empowering.

In practice, it often feels hollow.

Because real resilience — the kind forged in complex, unjust, high-pressure environments — looks nothing like a slide deck. It isn’t always calm. It isn’t always pretty. And it certainly isn’t a personal growth opportunity neatly disguised as institutional neglect.

What no one tells you is that resilience sometimes looks like grief. Or anger. Or stubborn silence. It looks like being misunderstood and still showing up. It looks like refusing to disappear — even when invisibility would be safer.

Resilience isn’t about bouncing back. It’s about remaining yourself when everything around you suggests you shouldn’t.

The Tension in Mastering Our Fates

Invictus

By William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

Henley’s words are spare and defiant, clenched against the world. They speak of a soul that cannot be conquered, no matter the pain or the pressure. And yet, as much as I love this poem — and I do — I’ve also come to see its limits.

Because we are not the masters of our fate, not entirely. The scroll is charged with punishments we didn’t write. The gate is narrow for reasons we didn’t choose. Control is unevenly distributed, privilege unevenly granted. And still, Henley’s voice offers something that is true: when all else is taken, we still have ourselves. Our will. Our response. Our refusal to bow.

Amanda Knox and the Interior Life

That truth echoes in an essay by Amanda Knox, reflecting on her years in an Italian prison for a crime she did not commit. She describes the moment when she realized, fully and finally: This is still my life. Not the life she wanted, not the one she planned, but hers nonetheless. And within that stark, narrow space, she still had choices — how to spend her time, how to carry herself, how to stay human in a place designed to strip that away.

That moment has stayed with me. Because her insight wasn’t grand or defiant — it was intimate. She didn’t rise with poetry. She simply claimed her own interior in a place that sought to erase it.

It made me realize that resilience isn’t always loud.

It isn’t always visible.

Sometimes it looks like survival inside a system designed to break you.

Sometimes it’s choosing to live in a life you didn’t ask for, with dignity, depth, and deliberate care.

Maya Angelou and the Radiance of Refusal

Still I Rise

By Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Where Henley grits his teeth and Knox reclaims her interior, Maya Angelou rises. Not just surviving — but refusing to be erased. Her resilience isn’t armored or stoic; it’s radiant, embodied, and unmistakably hers. She doesn’t shrink, doesn’t explain, doesn’t wait to be welcomed. She rises — again and again — like something inevitable.

But rising like that doesn’t happen by accident.

It takes effort to move with grace through a world that wants you flattened.

It takes energy to meet erasure with joy — or even with composure.

Angelou’s poem isn’t just a declaration. It’s a record of resistance, of showing up with presence and power when everything pushes you to vanish.

And that’s what resiliency training never touches:

Not just the courage it takes to keep going, but the labor of continuing.

The Work of Resilience

Resilience, as it’s often presented, sounds passive — like a quality you either possess or don’t. But the real thing takes labor. It takes waking up after another night of unrest and doing what needs to be done anyway. It takes managing perception, emotion, logistics, and reputation — often simultaneously. It takes discerning what to fight for and what to let go. It takes choosing, again and again, not to go numb.

And even that’s not always enough. Because no one is resilient alone.

There are privileges that make resilience possible: safety nets, mentors, second chances, being believed. There’s chance and timing and luck. There are people who see you when you’re breaking and quietly help hold the pieces together. Without those, survival can feel like a private, grinding miracle — the kind that looks effortless from the outside but costs everything on the inside.

That’s what no one tells you.

Resilience isn’t a glow-up. It’s a grind.

And for most of those who live it, there’s no award, no parade — just the quiet, difficult work of continuing.

What’s Left Out of the Slide Deck

Resilience isn’t a personal virtue. It’s a practice. A labor. A negotiation between who you are and what the world demands of you.

It’s not about bouncing back — it’s about carrying on in a life you didn’t ask for, in systems that weren't designed for you, with people who may never understand what it costs you to be there.

Sometimes resilience looks like grace.

Sometimes it looks like exhaustion.

Sometimes it looks like a person who keeps showing up — not because it’s redemptive, but because it’s necessary.

That’s the part we leave out:

Not that resilience is rare, but that it is hard.

And it’s still happening, quietly, in people all around you — whether you recognize it or not.