Resilience and Resistance

Resilience and Resistance
Photo by Louis Smit / Unsplash

I've had resilience on the mind a lot lately. Years ago I wrote a graduate term paper on the subject, comparing Willy Loman from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman to Santiago, the titular protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I'm fascinated by the different ways individuals react to seemingly similar outward circumstances: it's one of the biggest reasons I love acting. In particular I think a lot about trauma survivors, and I wonder how some survivors are able to overcome extensive and deeply traumatic pasts, even devoting their lives to spare others from the same traumas. I often worry that I'll eventually become either jaded or beat down by happenings in my life (thanks anxiety), so I think my amazement with the resilience of survivors comes from a feeling that I might one day need their inspiration to survive traumas of my own. To me, this sort of resilience seems both quintessentially human and, at the same time, almost superhuman, and I want to know where to look for it if there comes a moment that I have to.

One of the most stunning examples of resilience I can think of is Harriet Tubman. Last month I had the extraordinary opportunity to travel to the National Historic Park named for her as part of a group performing a short play about her life. I learned many of the details that had left out of her story in my Texas public school education (in which her name and the Underground Railroad were mentioned, but mostly as a footnote). While enslaved, she waded through freezing water trapping muskrats during the winter. She suffered a head injury that led to fainting spells for the rest of her life. She contracted herself out as a laborer to earn money for her family (a supposed privilege for which she had to pay her master a fee). After all this, and after escaping from slavery herself, she went back to free others, not once or twice but thirteen times. She later became the first woman in U.S. history to lead a combat mission for the Union during the Civil War, a raid that freed hundreds of other slaves. Her remarkable life leads me to believe that the key ingredient for resilience is resistance. Some might see her life as a simple sequence–Harriet Tubman survived, and then she chose to fight–but I believe the connection is deeper than that: I believe she was a fighter, and that helped her survive.

Harriet Tubman in 1885, from the National Portrait Gallery

I think this theory is borne out by the psychological concept of learned helplessness, whereby individuals experiencing repeated mental distress due to circumstances beyond their control essentially give up trying to resist, finding such resistance futile. That's speaking broadly, of course, and the reasons do or don't succumb to learned helplessness are highly variable and personal. For Tubman, it seems her faith was a pillar of support for her: she could never believe herself to be truly helpless when she believed God was watching over her. The hope provided by faith in a higher power has been understood for centuries, from the Catholic church addressing the sin of despair (i.e. utter hopelessness considered to be equivalent to complete faithlessness) to the secular Alcoholics Anonymous including the acknowledgement of a higher power (whether or not divine) as one of its twelve steps. After my own faith crisis, I struggled mightily for years–and still struggle sometimes–with hopeless feelings, feeling directionless, worthless, and pointless. I eventually found my higher powers (less spiritually-minded people may call them values), but it took a lot of searching, a lot of painful honesty and resistance to my more escapist tendencies.

Like with anything, the hardest part about resistance is starting, overcoming the inertia preventing you from acting upon your undesirable status quo which, however painful, is the devil you know. But once you start, it gets easier with time. My first days of sobriety were tense, as I clung to my newfound label like a badge I could flash at people at the first sign of danger. Now, it rarely comes up in conversation. My first moments on stage had me considering monastic (read: academic) life as an alternative. Now I live to perform, even though–or maybe because–it scares me so much. I'm certain there is plenty of further growth ahead for me, and I know some of it will be painful. But I will survive that pain, resisting the forces that would seek to keep me from growing. I will remember Harriet Tubman's example, wearing my new bracelet that bears her words:

"I prayed to God to make me strong and able to fight, and that's what I've always prayed for ever since."