Resilience requires two main ingredients: the ability to bounce back from adversity and the ability to grow from challenges.
Earlier this week, I started an online class offered by the University of Pennsylvania on how to apply the principles of positive psychology to the development of one’s resilience. I hope to implement its most salient lessons at my school: from a structural standpoint (how can our school become more deliberate in the development of our students’ resilience?), a pedagogical standpoint (how can my colleagues and I construct our lessons with an eye on resilience development?), and from a friendship standpoint (how can my colleagues and I become more resilient in the way we respond to the adversities in our own lives?).
Along with a lecture, our assignments this week contained two stories about how two different people demonstrated resilience in the face of adversity. The point of the stories was to highlight some of the major variables that go into the makeup of resilience. Those variables were the subject of the lecture. For a homework assignment, I’m supposed to tell my own resilience story and to identify the ways those variables manifest throughout it. This is that story.
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I’ve never been to war. I’ve never lost a limb. I’ve never suffered from a major injury or illness. All of my family members continue to live a respectable length of time. I’ve been very, very lucky.
So lucky, in fact, that the biggest obstacle I’ve had to face (I think) is my anxiety disorder. I make no apologies for that. I am incredibly grateful for everything I have — even those things that only came to me due to my white, straight, cis, male privilege. I understand why I feel as grateful as I do, and I work every day to help more people feel that way too. I make no apologies for that.
What I do make, though, is payments to a pharmaceutical company.
The first anxiety attack I can identify happened when I was in high school. I was with a group of friends at a house on the harbor. One of my friends had a boat moored in the harbor, and everyone (maybe half a dozen of us) wanted to take it out for a ride. Everyone stripped off their shirts, dove in, and started swimming for the boat. I joined them, but even as I jumped into the water, I knew something was wrong.
The first thing was that I knew I wasn’t a strong swimmer, and I doubted my ability to actually reach the boat. The second thing was that some of the people in the group weren’t my “friends” exactly, as much as they were “the popular kids.” I got along with them well enough to sometimes pal around with them when the circumstances were meet. As I jumped into the ocean, I not only feared the water, but also the embarrassment my drowning would cause.
I jumped in anyway, and about halfway to the boat, my greatest fear came true: my muscles cramped, my heart-rate shot up, and the incoming and outgoing waves didn’t care. I started to drown.
I am five-feet, six-inches tall. I was in water that was maybe five-feet, nine-inches deep, with the waves increasing that by maybe two or three inches every few seconds. My muscles didn’t want to bounce me off the bottom of the harbor, but I forced myself to do it anyway. “Help!” I called out, my head above the waves for a moment, and then the salt water down my throat. Bounce! Cough, cough. “Hel…” Water in mouth. Bounce.
Then I saw him: Gigantor, strolling through the waves like a titan, each stride long and slow and strong, his arm reaching out, his hand approaching me in slow motion.
I grabbed at it, clawed at it, “Help me!,” and he did.
Out of everyone in that group, he was the one I knew was my friend. He had been there in the past; he would be there in the future; and here he was now, again.
He laughed the whole way over to the boat, him walking on his flat feet, me holding onto his shoulder for dear life with my torso and legs dragging in the water behind us. He pushed me up onto the boat; the others had caught on to what was happening, and they pulled me up too. I sat on the edge of something and coughed salt water onto the deck. “Are you okay, man?” “You okay?” “What happened?”
Someone started the boat and we drove off.
It wasn’t until later that I recognized the incident for what it was: an anxiety attack. My body didn’t give out — I was in my teens, and while I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I was a regular athlete, playing hours of basketball virtually every day; my body was in fine shape. What gave out was my mind. I was so anxious before I even began that I manifested my eventual failure.
The next anxiety attack I can identify happened about five years ago. I’m a little confused as to the timeline, but my wife and I were living in the last rental we’d have, an octagonal house set back from a country road (and hidden completely by trees in the summertime). I was teaching at two different jobs, one at the high school where I work now and another at the college where I still sometimes adjunct. I don’t think my wife and I were pregnant yet, and I don’t think I still had the marketing job I once had, but I could be wrong on both accounts.
What I do know is that it was still early in my “not working from home” career. For almost a decade, I had worked online as a copywriter, marketing coordinator, and project manager for a small to medium-sized company headquartered in Florida. I had worked at their Boston office prior to going to college, and they continued to employ me throughout my years in Vermont. But now my teaching jobs paid enough that I could give up what had become a soul-sucking experience, and I’d quit.
The issue (if there was one) was that I had been working from home for so long that I rarely felt like someone was counting on me. I worked extremely independently, and for the past year or so of my job, without a real manager; virtually every project I was assigned came with little to zero oversight, outside of the clients who ultimately had to approve it, which they almost invariably did.
But now I was a teacher. I had students who depended on me. And every single day I had to stand face to face with their expectant little eyes and ears and not only educate them, but entertain them; I needed to keep their attention long enough for them to actually get something from the experience.
It’s no wonder I suffered an anxiety attack.
The attack that started the modern era of my anxiety disorder happened in front of a room full of college students. I remember being late for class that day. I’m not often late for the classes I teach at the college, but it happens once in a while. This might have been the first time, however.
I didn’t have the panic attack before I arrived at the class, nor did I have it when I first got there. It took a while for whatever was happening in my body and brain to really come to flower, and about 40 minutes into a 45 minute class, my vision suddenly collapsed to a point: everything else was blurry. A heat wave rushed over my body, and all of my muscles tensed. Sweat broke out on the small of my back.
One of my students was standing up at her chair, reciting one of her stories. I leaned back against the metal desk and held on for dear life. “Don’t lose it,” I told myself. “They’re all looking up at you, but they have no idea what’s happening to you right now. Just hold on until she stops speaking. Just hold on.”
She came to a stop. I had no idea what she’d said or read or anything. “Okay,” I said aloud. “We’re gonna call class a little early today. Email me if you need anything.” I remember the confused look in one of my student’s eyes, but then I saw the acceptance of what I’d said, and he started packing his things to go.
I stood at the desk until everyone left the classroom, then I exhaled loudly, packed up my bag, and walked outside. “What the fuck is happening to me right now?” I thought. I could feel the insides of my arms and legs. A tingling slithered around my body like a confused and scared snake was crawling in the folds beneath my skin, up one arm, across my chest, down my belly, over my thigh, into my calf, and back up again, fast and scared and tingling, around and around and around. “What the fuck is happening to me?”
I walked to library. I thought to myself, if only I can find a place to sit, open up a book, distract myself for a second. I tried, but couldn’t do it. I ended up pacing in the back corner of the stacks.
I had another class starting in about 15 minutes, one on writing for media (rather than writing for fun). The classroom was in the basement of the library. There was no way I could lead a class full of students right now. I waited for the tingling feeling to subside, for my breathing to slow, for my heart rate to decrease. The feelings didn’t quite cease, but the climactic part of the wave had passed, and I was able to get it together long enough to go to my classroom and write on the white board in black marker that class was canceled.
At some point, and I’m not 100% sure where it happened during the day, I was standing on the patio of what is now my high school but what was then a bakery and coffee shop, and I’m talking to the doctor’s office, trying to get someone to tell me that I’m going to be all right. It might have been before I went to the library; it might have been after; but it definitely happened.
I made an appointment for later that afternoon, maybe two hours from when I made the phone call. The doctor’s office was 10 minutes to the north. My octagon was 10 minutes to the south. I didn’t want to be where I was, so I decided to drive home.
The wave struck again while I was driving. I opened the window, turned up the music. “Breathe,” I told myself aloud. “Just breathe.” I got home, ran up the three stairs of our front porch, slammed through the door (scaring the hell out of my cat), and started pacing like crazy. “Pour some water,” I said aloud. “Drink something cold.”
At some point I called my wife, who was still at her teaching job back in the town I’d just driven home from. I don’t remember what I told her, but I remember her saying that she would come to the doctor with me, and I remember, 90 minutes later, how scared she looked when she came out her school to get in the driver’s seat and take me the rest of the way to the doctor.
He listened to my story, checked me out, and at the end of everything, said to me, “It sounds like a panic attack.”
It was like a light turned on. Of course. Of course it was. I’m not dying. I just had a panic attack.
I’ve had panic attacks since then. One of them got bad enough that I called 911 on myself and had to be taken to a hospital, where after several hours of waiting, they gave me a pill and sent me home (I was more than two hours away from home; my wife had to have a friend drive her and my daughter to come get me; my baby daughter ended up puking in the car on the way home from the hospital; we had to change her on the side of the road in rural Vermont; my wife was my hero that day).
I had one at a Phish show, when I was all alone with nobody I really knew, in a distant city, with no understanding of how to get back to the place where I was staying, and no close friends in the crowd (my sister-in-law and her husband were with me at the show, but they’d left me with their friends to go get some water; I wasn’t “really” alone). I crouched down onto the ground, told myself to breathe, looked at all of the happy Phish fans around me, and repeated the mantra, “When the music comes on, everything will get better. Just keep breathing.” When the music came on, that’s exactly what happened.
I stopped worrying about my panic attacks after that. I take a prescription to help manage them, but when they come on, I know what they are, and I just wait for them to pass. They’re not pleasant, and I’m not able to detach myself from the negative sensations that accompany them, but I am able to find someplace in my mind to remember, and repeat over and over, to just keep breathing, because this too shall pass.
I have students who are crippled by their anxieties, but I try to tell them my story whenever the lesson applies, because the methods I’ve used, the resilience I’ve shown in the face of that anxiety, might just work for them.
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The variables that influence resilience — the variables we can control for, anyway — include:
- Self-awareness: How often do you hit the pause button and think, “What’s going on with me internally right now?”
- Self-regulation: Do you have the ability to change your thoughts, emotions, and physiology when what you’re experiencing isn’t helping you overcome an adverse situation?
- Mental agility: Can you look at things from multiple perspectives? Can you analyze a problem down to its root and enact a set of specific solutions?
- Optimism: Can you envision a positive future? Can you recognize what you can control and what you need to accept? Can you see a problem as a challenge rather than a threat, something to be leaned into with eagerness and excitement?
- Self-efficacy: Do you know what your strengths are and how to apply them? Do you enter into new experiences with an “I can master this” attitude?
- Connection: Do you feel safe with people, and do you have at least one person you know you can rely on, regardless of the situation? Do you feel attached to something larger than yourself, a connection that comes with a sense of spirituality or purpose?
- Positive Institutions: Do you have the support of your family, community, and workplace, or do those institutions erode your ability to overcome adversity?
My story includes some of those variables. It took a while to develop a sense of self-awareness around my anxiety disorder, but now that I have it, I don’t let the potential for an attack prevent me from doing what I want or need to do.
Part of the way I overcame that fear was my ability to self-regulate. I know how to slow my breathing, how to calm myself with a mantra, how to look forward to the time when the attack will cease, and how to rationalize my way through whatever the verbal manifestation of my panic attack is telling me in my head to the point where I can consciously tell myself to relax, just relax, you’re not dying and you won’t hurt at the end of this, so relax, just relax.
My mental agility (however agile it might be) isn’t a key factor in my ability to be resilient in the face of my anxiety disorder, though I suppose it requires some mental agility to read up on the psychological theories that spring up around it and some discipline to wade through all of the new-age bullshit advice on how to deal with it.
My optimism (“This too shall pass”) and my sometimes irrational sense of self-efficacy (“I can handle this”) are huge components in my ability to be resilient, as are the connections I have in my life. Everyone in my family has been incredibly supportive (my wife most of all), as have my colleagues at school (my boss especially) and my friends near and far. I can handle this because all of these people have my back.
Of course, I’m only able to feel this optimistic because of the institutions that allowed me to get to this point, including the ultimately destructive institutions of my privilege. I have access to helpful medication and a supportive network of physicians. I have colleagues who specialize in mental health. I have an education that showed me the intrinsic rewards that come from curiosity and inquisitiveness and was also steeped in theories of consciousness, the mind, and the brain. And of course, I have a close and supportive family and community.
Whatever resilience I have, I get it because of these things. And for that, I am grateful.
