“I just don’t let things bother me.” Ever heard someone say this?
Deep breath. I have reactions and thoughts, but first let me share a short story.
I remember one time I was on a particularly turbulent airplane ride. I had the window seat overlooking the wing. I felt frightened as I watched the wings bounce impossibly up and down. I remember worrying if the wings were going to snap off and this would be the end of my story.
The flight had been so scary for me that I called my dad upon landing and told him my experience. When I told him about watching the wings bounce with such intensity I thought they’d break off, he told me, “Anna, you want the wings to bounce. If they were too rigid, they would fall off.”
This struck me then, and continues to be an important life lesson.
Resiliency is a big concept in the therapeutic world. Indeed, much of what I do with clients is help them build their own resiliency to life’s challenges.
Put simply, resiliency can be thought of as our ability to “bounce back” and adjust to life’s adversities. Intuitively we focus a lot on that “bouncing back” process. But equally important to resiliency is the impact in the first place.
The wind exerted incredible force on the airplane wing and the wing moved in response. The wing let itself be impacted by the events around it. This ability to move in the first place; indeed the ability to be moved in the first place, is key to its resiliency.
It is the same for us. There is no inherent resiliency in “just not letting things bother us.” There is no good life skill in this. In fact, resiliency comes from allowing events to impact us and move us. It is in these impacts that the challenge, insights, and growth happen. We need to be moved in order to grow and change.
Glennon Doyle has wise words on this topic,
“Being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything…It’s okay to feel all the stuff you’re feeling… You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”
People who have learned to “just not let things bother them” are missing out on valuable life lessons and growth that come from feeling the full range of emotions inherent in the human experience.
Those dark spaces full of struggle and intense feeling, that come from the impact of lived human experience, are sacred. They are where we truly learn who we are and what we are capable of. This is where we learn we can do hard things, which is the definition of resiliency.