The Pandemic: Tap Into Your Resilience
It is such a privilege to experience and feel the spectrum of human emotion in such a short period. Yes, I said it, a privilege. We come out with a much more interesting story to tell. One that other people can feel. One that empowers them to tap into their own resilience.
Right now, we are witnessing each other persevere through one of the most difficult times of our lives. As a biology student, I spent years reading primary literature that assessed the role that mirror neurons play in biological phenomenon, a cell that is active both when we are observing an act and performing an action. The fact that these neurons fire during an observation in the same fashion that they would if an action was being performed is indicative of where we get resilience. We see it. Our mirror neurons play a pivotal role in the circuitry that wires our resilience. Maybe it’s the science geek in me, but I find this truth so enlightening. It affirms the belief that each and every single one of us stands on the shoulders of giants.
So, what exactly does it mean to stand on the shoulders of giants?
When you think of the practice of being resilient, you think of how strong you need to be to make it through a circumstance. That can feel so isolating. As opposed to telling yourself, ‘I need to be strong’, try telling yourself ‘I am strong because my family, friends, and community have modeled what strength looks like.’ Our mirror neurons are proof that we have all seen and are currently seeing what strength looks like. If you didn’t have an example of what resilience looked like in your rearview before this pandemic, I know without a doubt that there are now beaming examples all around you.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is the empowering concept of walking with pride on the platform upon which those before us have worked tirelessly to build.
In 2003, much like the uncertainty of COVID-19, my mother was deployed to Afghanistan on a whim. I was just finishing the first grade and it was turning out to be a rough year. My father lost his job. My long beautiful brown hair, a pride of mine, had started falling out. I even had trouble sleeping. My mother and I could only communicate for a few minutes a couple times a week, so she didn’t have much time to console me. It was a lot to process for a child, but children are a lot more resilient than we think. I realized that if I was going to make it through this overwhelming year, I had to learn how to console myself.
If right now you’re feeling overwhelmed yourself, I know practicing resilience is the last ideology you want to think of. But how else do we work our way through this mess? A friend and I were discussing what these past few months have taught us and one thing remained clear and consistent for me. Everything starts with me. As I’ve grown I’ve developed more and more of my own internal locus of control. That is resilience. Throughout my life, like anyone else I’ve been tested and tried but ultimately that never seemed to matter enough.
Reflecting back to 2003 is what revealed to me that resilience is self-talk. It’s becoming your own sort of therapist and cheerleader in those really tough moments. It’s talking yourself down and talking yourself up. Talking yourself down is the process of grounding yourself back down to ground zero. When I was frustrated and felt alone during the year of my mother’s departure, that’s precisely what I did. Grounding myself as a child meant reminding myself of what I had to look forward to. Weeks at home may have been tough, but I knew that on the weekends my mom’s best friend or my grandparents would come to pick me and my baby sister up. It was my primary source of motivation.
Talking yourself up is the process of praising, affirming, and uplifting yourself. At the time, I prided myself on being a great big brother. Up until this day, I still do. Before my mom left, we sat down and she told me that I had to look out for my sister. She was only 2 years old at the time. I had to be resilient for her. So, I learned that I could talk myself up by reminding myself that at the end of the day I was succeeding at being a big brother. I was becoming the giant’s shoulders upon which she could stand on. And, it was one of the only gratifying feelings at the time.
I know that not everyone has the capacity to develop their own practice of resilience through self-talk due to being at different places in their mental health journey. And that is okay. It has taken me years to talk myself through what I go through with grace, love, understanding, and compassion. I will forever be a student of this.
