Is Resilience a Problem?

I am grieving for my adopted country. And I do not want to feel better.

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The first few days after the election, I could barely get out of bed in the morning. The days following the inauguration were, if anything, worse. Like so many of you, I have been feeling a deep sense of grief for my adopted country, which, despite everything, I love. And I have built my home here. I feel nauseated by the way the Trump administration is going after the most vulnerable people—and people I love dearly—with such relentless cruelty. I am terrified by the naked power grabs that surely portend the end of American democracy as we know it.

But now, three weeks in, I am beginning to feel better. There is no longer a weight on my chest that seems insurmountable in the morning. The sickened feeling is still there, but the intensity is lower. It is easier to sleep and eat. Bodily imperatives—to rest, to move, to breathe—inevitably reassert themselves.

And I am not sure how I feel about this shift. In some moments, it feels healthy: a reassertion of self and body at a time when we all need to fight as vigorously as possible. At other times, I worry that this is part of normalization—that it is easy for those of us who will, in all likelihood, be OK due to our privilege, to become insulated and complacent. We become numb to the unbearable and thus, despite ourselves, accept it. We refuse to face the reality and instead call it all unthinkable—meaning not that it cannot be thought about but that we do not want to.

This affective quandary sharpens a question I’ve been wondering about for a while: is resilience, far from being the solution to all our ills, actually part of the problem? Does the natural elasticity of human well-being prevent us from hanging onto our justified grief, fear, and anger? Does it stop us from feeling what we ought to about unconscionable states of affairs, and thus helping to assuage, protest, prevent them?

There are other problems with the resilience model too. In her brilliant book, The Myth of Resilience,

Soraya Chemaly

shows that the emphasis on bouncing back is a version of the bad old bootstraps argument. Instead of recognizing the community care that is needed to support people who have been felled, and the way that we can’t truly recover from trauma when we are unheld, we insist that people should individually return themselves to normalcy. Instead of building a world that doesn’t traumatize people in the first place, we judge those who don’t recover quickly from what they’ve suffered, and deem them weak or fragile.

My “yes, and” point here is that resilience, for those who do bounce back, is a decidedly mixed blessing. It’s well-documented that people’s well-being tends to hover around a baseline, with major life events—both traumatic and serendipitous—affecting our average mood only briefly. Amputees and lottery winners alike tend to end up roughly as happy as they were before the seismic change in their lifestyle. Think your happiness is one relationship or achievement or purchase away? You are probably wrong, happily or unhappily.

I worry that our natural resilience, in the face of political calamity, leaves us out of step with what we should be feeling. And this is a problem for at least two reasons. One, when the world is on fire, it is apt to feel burned, as Amia Srinivasan has argued. Even if feeling better would help us to take action, in our own lives and that of others, there’s something inherently troubling about a mismatch between the gravity of the situation and the buoyancy of our emotions. Two, I am not convinced that feeling better is a reliable harbinger of action. All too often, we use the energy of well-being to feather our own nest rather than help other people who are unmoored, alone, ousted.

I am no exception. Though it pains me to say, some of my own coping mechanisms are material. I declutter the house and buy cute felt baskets on Etsy to house my daughter’s treasures. I fantasize about a new couch to sit on while I write my angry essays. I comfort myself both with sheer stuff and with a safe, cozy home environment. The world may be burning but my sock drawer is in order.

The easy answer to all of this is to feel better, sure, but use the resultant energy to protest. But I’m not sure it is that simple. The truth is that there’s a limited amount we can do at the moment, and we may be doing what we can already. Feeling gutted is a way to bear witness for those who are suffering, and that is inherently important. It’s not a precursor to doing justice to those who are the most vulnerable. It is a way to do justice to them, albeit one that must be supplemented with action whenever that is possible.

And another lesson from Chemaly is crucial to remember: our anger is a resource. It is precious, and it is precarious in a world that wants women to be sanguine. Misogyny wants women not just to be subservient, but to deliver subservience with a smile, devoid of subversion. Holding onto your anger, and cultivating it in the first place, is a crucial bulwark against this emotional coercion.

The literature on feminist anger is now vast and rich. And it contains two main ideas: first, that women are angry. Second, that we ought to be, in a world set up to conscript and control us in service of patriarchal interests. I am convinced by the second claim but not by the first. I think, all too often, that we lose our capacity to be angry and become enervated, numbstruck. Anger is too exhausting to maintain, and ultimately too confronting. Moreover, we are punished for our anger. And so we manage not to show or even feel it.

I want to hold onto my grief and my anger in this moment. I am furious that Americans returned Trump to the White House. I am furious that they chose to believe that a rapist and a gaslighter—America’s abusive dad, in a nutshell—would do a better job than a competent, compassionate woman. I am gutted that they chose a chance of lowering the price of eggs and gas over saving the lives of the women who will die under his administration, because they can’t get the abortion health care to which they are entitled. I am livid that they managed to convince themselves that the price of eggs and gas would actually get lower on this disastrous man-child’s watch. I am sickened that they don’t care about much beyond their pocket books.

And it is not just Trump voters. Even in my liberal and progressive circles, I see signs of complacency. I wrote, for example, about the plight of trans women earlier this week, in view of the systematic assault on trans rights that is accelerating at a dizzying speed in this country. Friends, it disturbs me to say that I’ve never received less of a reaction for my posts here. It’s not that my readers were hostile to my argument that cis women and trans women are fundamentally in the same, overpoliced boat—there was no flurry of unsubscribes or mean-spirited comments, thankfully. No, just crickets. It felt like a real failure of the feminist solidarity that is needed now more than ever. It felt like a desertion of the people who most need us.

And so, this week at least, I am choosing not to be resilient. I am not crumpled in a heap, but there is an alternative to elastically bouncing back and feeling loose and supple. Instead, I am taut and tense with anger—and, I hope, vigilance. I am sadder than is comfortable. My heart will not be rubber.