Resilience and Coping in the Pandemic

I was curious about what resilience, surviving and thriving has looked like for people in my life in the past year or so. Fellow Bonfire alumna and friend Susan was talking about the book Burnout recently, and how the authors talk about completing the stress cycle: essentially dealing with the stressor, and acknowledging once it is gone. It isn’t something we as modern humans are particularly good at, and in the pandemic, the blurring of boundaries has dissolved a lot of rituals that helped us cope in the before times - a commute was a way to physically step away from work; lunch with a colleague could interrupt a worry spiral. 

I posed this question to people: what has resilience looked like for you in the last year? 

Qin tells me how the question first reminded her about the definition of resilience in physics, which is how easy it is for a material to come back to its original state when stretched. The science behind the word does not capture what it means for us human beings.  For her and her husband, resilience during the last 14 months was shaped by the Start, Continue and Stop model. While I know this concept by way of work, I hadn’t ever heard it being part of someone’s personal life, and of course once I heard it, it makes all the sense in the world. In conversations with her and others, the key themes that showed up were: 

Acceptance

If you don’t know this, If you don’t know this, Qin has a black belt in Aikido, a Japanese martial art, and she talks about how she adopted the Aikido concept in how she approached the pandemic: instead of resisting your opponent, in Aikido you practice keeping your balance, invite in and blend with the energy of your opponent's attack, and guide the encounter to a peaceful conclusion for you and your opponent. People who thrived during the pandemic are most likely to be the ones who accepted the new reality of the pandemic early on. 

Many of us also had to accept the noise and silence which came from being at home for long stretches of time. There was noise from family, pets, and neighbors (some of mine discovered singing talents unfortunately); but there was also the silence that came from not having to be on the move always. Sitting with one's thoughts is not always easy, particularly if it isn’t an intentional choice. Of course, we still had the distraction of our screens, those will never leave us. 

Another thing that came up for us was the fear of illness and death at our doors, and how we completely fell apart because our mortality is rarely something we talk about, and in one fell swoop all the rituals that allowed us to mourn were taken away from us. 

I’d like to take a minute here and talk about who got to thrive: it wasn’t a blanket opportunity for everyone; the pandemic impacted all of us but some were much worse off than others. There was privilege in who got to thrive, who did not face death, job loss, food insecurity, emotional and physical trauma, and there is privilege in even being able to have this conversation. 

Pivoting

Qin and I talk about how people sometimes get stuck in narratives long after the narratives no longer serve them. While there is no doubt that we felt the loss of many of the most essential parts of how we live -- seeing other people, being able to hug loved ones, traveling -- some people were focused on what they were missing and unable to find new ways of being and living. Others who were able to accept that life as we knew it had changed, were able to adopt new ways more easily -- Zoom calls with families, game nights, working out at home and a million other ways. Being able to let go is a key life skill, and it became even more important during the pandemic. Qin sums it up eloquently: In its definition in physics, resilience is about bouncing back to the original shape. For human beings, we need to recognize that with challenges, chances are we won't go back to the old life. So re-writing the new story and creating a new reality is an important step for us to fully recover.

Continuing and Building

Resilience had to show up way before the pandemic in Alexis’ life. In Dec 2018, she started a new and exciting career, her first management role, where she expected to have at least a couple of months to get up to speed. So much happened right after that: Two months in she was doing the work of three people in a role which she was still learning; dealing with her father’s illness and then planning a funeral in Mississippi; and managing her own health issues. After having some tests done, she learned her health conditions were stress-related. 

She tells me that for her resilience is “when you want to give up and quit, but continuing anyway through it all.”  It took a while to recover/bounce back, but time is relative. Now she is in a much better place, even though stressors come and go as long as you have a good support system of resilient persons, you CAN make it through!

Qin and her husband have always enjoyed Board games, and found a way to play online. Her husband brought together his college friends scattered all over the world many years after their graduation using the online version of Euchre.

Letting Go

Qin stopped watching news which gave her more anxiety than information (and similarly stepped away from toxic people), and I think that is a rule for life I would like to adopt. If all you are getting are negative messages which hurt your well-being, then is it really worth it?

It is clear that resilience showed up in a variety of expected and unexpected ways in our lives, and is a muscle that we build and use all our lives. I hope there is never another globally catastrophic event we have to experience in our lifetimes but I know that we will all experience challenges, even if life goes back to the normal we remember. For me resilience is not a substitute for healing; there is a lot of work that is ahead of us. My hope for myself and you is that our resilience muscle is a little bit stronger than it was before.