Everybody has their own definition of resilience. But personally, I almost always take things at face value, so what resilience means to me is “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”  So It’s literally just the definition of resilience. Psychological resilience is something completely different though. Okay well not really, but hear me out on this one.  It is so much more difficult to have psychological resilience rather than physical resilience. For example, saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is proclaiming that your psychological resilience is much stronger than your physical resilience and that it is an achievement. Everybody has had their breaking moment psychologically. For me, it was bumping into a classmate whilst going from fifth period to sixth period at Simpson Middle School. I was already having the worst day of my life. Maybe it was because I hadn’t stayed in the counselor's office or the library all day like I usually did. But it was that one minor inconvenience that broke me. I rushed back to the special ed room and just started bawling my eyes out. I had texted my mom to come pick me up and all I had to do was wait but I couldn’t help but cry. I was yelling and screaming. I was inconsolable. Simpson Middle School had the gall to say my mom was abusing me. Simpson Middle School made me so unbelievably sad that I had to start taking antidepressants, and then they want to say it was my mom abusing me? They then made me take their online classes which in their defense was better but online classes have proven to not work. I’ve exceeded hit my 250 word count. Goodbye. 

Resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. I have a lot of resilience when it comes to challenges and changes. But the first thing that comes to mind when I think of resilience is Shame Resilience.

To me, shame makes me feel humiliated and distressed and is painful. When my mom expressed to me that she loves and cares about me, I felt ashamed because of the amount of times I have rejected her love and care because I hated her. After all that, she still loved me and that made me feel humiliated and worthless.

I have never had resilience when it comes to shame. In the realm of shame, my resilience remains a stranger, for shame rends me asunder, tearing me to threads of vulnerability, unraveling the fabric of my being until become untethered, a whispered echo of myself. Recently, I have been working on my shame resilience and ability to withstand shame. 

Resilience is something that comes from hope. The song of hope never stops playing. You just have to listen for it. My resilience comes from my hope that things will change and improve as long as I try. I get out of my skin, walk around a bit, and hear the song. The song allows me to build resilience.

Resilience to me is any time when it is easier in the moment to give up than keep going but you find a reason to keep going anyways. It is focusing less on how comfortable you are in the moment and zooming out to look at what is important in the big picture and the future rewards you will reap. Resilience is realizing that the feeling of security in your comfort zone is an illusion. Resilience is making an effort to find a reason to bother with it all: one of the easiest ways to lose resilience is to fall into a state of apathy. Resilience is like kicking your feet off the ground at first so you can swing on a swing; once you get the ball rolling and a sense of inertia everything gets easier over time. After you learn to roll with the punches the blows become much softer. Resilience is viewing yourself as bigger than your obstacles and taking them down instead of letting them take you down; it is believing in your power to overcome things instead of a sense of helplessness in the face of whatever life throws at you. Resilience is realizing that you are a human being that can stand on your own two feet and not just a drop in the ocean or something easily blown away by the wind. Resilience is focusing on what keeps you going rather than what's stopping you. It is focusing on the motion of your feet running on the ground instead of the ground beneath. 

While I was in a residential facility, I became friends with a psychopath. We didn’t know each other beforehand but we had become good friends in the short amount of time leading up to when we got into a fight. The fight occurred when my friend attacked another kid. I was forced to put him in a headlock, and he got sent away after that. It really was horrible. I’ve been through much in my eighteen years, and that is just one of the trials I’ve persisted through. Resilience is a very strong and empowering adjective to me. Resilience, to me, means mental or/and physical strength to pass through hardships without losing it all. I would like to think I’m a very resilient person. January of this year, I was in a horrible mental spot. I felt as if I had nothing to live for anymore. So I attempted to harm myself in the worst way possible. I was sent into residential treatment for a month which was 300 miles away from everyone I knew. I didn’t know anyone there and wasn’t able to see my parents in person. It was the longest month of my life I had up to that point. After that, I was discharged and sent into partial hospitalization for three months, while I was able to stay at home now, it was also starting from scratch not knowing a single person. I almost got sent back to residential again, but managed not to, even though I probably should have been. After the three months in partial hospitalization, I stepped down to intensive outpatient and was in there for another three months. I got discharged from the whole program August 23rd, 2023, after going into residential January 19th, 2023. That is seven whole months of just straight therapy. I think I’m resilient.

Resilience means a lot to me especially when things in my life happen to me. Because not always are we going to want to keep going after something difficult is happening to us. In situations like a death or something happening or not getting the news we wanted as an outcome we tend to focus on the negatives of what we are going through except what we need to think is it happening because there are better plans or that they would be suffering anymore.  And we need to have resilience and we need to think we can get through this because we are strong enough. If we dwell on what is happening too much or the past we are not going to have the resilience we need in life to push through. We as people need to learn that there are ways to cope with how we feel emotionally because if we do not learn it is only going to get more difficult as we get older.  We need to be able to rise above what is happening and not completely down to people we need to show that we are strong and capable. In some sports they start teaching at a young age just how much you need to have resilience in your life. When it gets taught to you at a young age you are mostly to use it in ways that will end up benefiting you in all kinds of different ways. When you will look back you will see how much of an influence it made on the way you did different things as a child. It sets you up for Many different ways of success when you are going through your stages of life.  When you play sports you need to understand resilience because when things on your team do not go as you planned. You have to Apply and show how you have learned resilience and how you can teach other people how to be resilient. In life, things are going to be hard and not always going to go your way.  If you have resilience it is going to be beneficial for your life.