Thinking of it in another way, we reverse engineer what we consider to be resilience. When someone or something persists and we like it, it is resilient, whereas if someone or something persists and we dislike it, it’s stubborn or defective. In point of fact, both types of binary judgment rest entirely on our own preconceptions. They are greater commentaries on ourselves than others.
When we say a patient is resilient, what we’re signaling is that this patient is deserving of our respect. We are saying that they deserve a boost from us because they seemed to do everything we would consider to be right. If I said that this patient with myositis smoked tobacco and was not interested in quitting, would we be as comfortable saying they are resilient?
Resilience Is Variable
The other discomfiting element of the word resilience is that it seems to more commonly describe individuals than communities. Our modern American society values rugged individualism (e.g., pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, being a self-made person, setting out your own), but individuals are deeply interconnected. The concept of individual resilience seems to de-emphasize relationships.
In the case of our patient, she may very well be resilient, in the classic sense of the word. But she likely also depends upon many others to maintain that resiliency. By focusing on her resilience and not acknowledging anyone else’s, we’ve simplified a complex scenario.
Even if you concede that resilience is a trait at the individual level, resilience isn’t a static value that pops out of a vacuum. Resilience—or, at the very least, the collection of virtues we associate with it—is very much the result of habits and mentalities that we inculcate through the course of our own lives. Twin studies suggest there may even be an inherited component.5 Similarly, just because someone is resilient today doesn’t mean they will remain resilient in the future. So saying that an individual is resilient can be misleading.
Moreover, for many people in our world, mere existence is a testament to their own resilience. Our world is defined by a set of injustices and inequities that trace back long into our histories. The fact that so many of us from marginalized and minoritized communities even exist is a sign of resilience that has been conveyed from generations untold. For them, resilience isn’t a virtue so much as a truism of life. By labeling somebody resilient, we deny that historical record. At worst, we implicitly indict someone’s ancestors for not being resilient enough in the way that we expect them to comport.
