Resilience is a Necessity

The idea of resilience brings about mixed feelings to me. There’s the dread of going through adversity. It feels unpleasant to say the least. Yet, this is only part of resilience. According to AI, resilience is “both a process and an outcome. It’s the ability to ‘bounce back’ from difficult experiences and maintain psychological well-being.” Therefore, resilience, inevitably applied to overcome difficulty, results in positive mindset–triumph to say the least. AI lists some characteristics of resilience: “problem-solving skills, strong social connections, survivor mentality, emotional regulation, and self-compassion.”

My life has been a continuous process of resilience with serious mental illness: schizoaffective thoughts disorder with OCD and delusions. I take 17 pills a day from seven psyche meds to treat my mental illness and manage symptoms. I feel it is a lot, but it’s what I must do to avoid tidal waves of anxiety, OCD tendencies, depression, psychosis, mania, mood swings and much more. I have no choice but to be in survivor mentality. There is hope because my condition was way worse during my four hospitalizations since 1999.

My pregnancy with twins on minimal medications was severely difficult, yet the first year especially of their lives was stressful as well. I was having panic/anxiety attacks every other day for 2-3 hours trying to block out their crying. I also had to keep up with mixing the formulas for their milk, cleaning bottle parts, assembling them, sterilizing their bottles and heating them up when ready to be fed and worrying in the process that my husband and I would fall behind and be unprepared.  

Who knew that four years later I would have a 14-day streak without anxiety attacks with the meds I’m on today? Life is much easier and the twin girls are doing well in transitional kindergarten. I try to apply emotional regulation and problem-solving skills by telling myself that worrying does not change the outcome of things. Today, I am able to have self-compassion with myself to know that I have it rough, but cut myself a break where possible.

My strong social connections with friends and church members who understand my illness and empathize for me keep me going. I have a dear friend with severe back issues and we bond and connect about our daily struggles by phone. The people I talk to are safe, good listeners and supportive. Their prayers and my prayer life are helpful as well.

Here’s a quote from a valentine written by a student I recorded down because it was so good: “Everyone wants happiness, no one wants pain, but you can’t have a rainbow without a little rain.” I say, in these circumstances, wear your umbrella of resilience—it is a necessity.