This weekend I was at a Women's Retreat on Resiliency.
One of the takeaways that I had was that I went into the retreat thinking that I had no resilience. I think about all the shit that my grandmother went through, and yet she was (to my young eyes) solid as a rock. She was the one person in my family who made me feel truly loved, and cared about. And I see myself; "dependent" on therapy to function, battling life-long struggles with anxiety and depression...and my many struggles with suicidal thoughts.
In one of the activities we were to share with a partner about a time we did NOT feel resilient. I was sharing about a period on time in 1991 where I'd experienced several losses, and traumas in a short period of time, and one night when my roommates were away the weight of it all crushed me. And it wasn't just the events of those few months, but the accumulation of unresolved trauma from my childhood. With the weight of all of that I had started sobbing with all of the grief (and I was not a crier...I cried at my dad's viewing and funeral that September, and I was DONE! Cowboys don't cry after all, right?), and I went into my gun cabinet, got my dad's .357, crawled under the table and put the cocked gun to my temple. As I told my partner in the retreat of the moment a tiny spark of hope said to me "what if tomorrow is better" and I put the gun down, it occurred to me that perhaps THAT was resilience. In that moment where I felt there was no hope for things to ever get better, for me to ever feel better, maybe, just maybe I could hang of for one more day.
And I've been thinking that maybe instead of all the times I have been at those crossroads where I was ready to close this show being examples of me not being resilient, perhaps the fact that each of those times I chose to cling to hope, I tried to reach out for community or support are examples of me being resilient.
I recently shared with a friend who was going through some shit about what my couples therapist had said about letting the relationship hold the hard stuff. One person can't hold the huge shit, but when we share the load it's manageable. In the retreat it occurred to me that letting others help me hold the load, ore even letting them hold me up doesn't mean that I'm not resilient, it means that I'm resilient enough to know when to ask for help. Maybe?
Anyway, one of the other activities was to write a blessing to ourselves when we most needed it. Here is mine:
May the hurts and wounds that struck so deep be healed, and may your
May you live courageously knowing that you are safe.
May you live mindfully knowing that you are resilient.
