Looking after yourself above anyone else
I hate the word resilience. It’s everywhere now – kids need it, adults need it, we apparently need it at work, home, the gym, even the garden plants need it!
There’s an expectation that you can do a course on resiliency and then “HEY PRESTO” you’re a resilient creature ready to face battle.
For me, resiliency is a factor of who we are at the core of our being that says you can do more when you least want to, and when others least expect you to. Testing my resiliency for me has felt like being slammed in the guts with a railway sleeper - doubled over in pain, barely able to breath, and then a car runs into the back of me and takes my legs out. And while I’m lying on the ground in the fetal position, a bird flies past and shits on my head (that has happened by the way – the bird part).
The end part, the ‘results-driven’ part of the resiliency test is whether I can, and want to, get up. Or whether I instead choose to lie there until someone picks me up and carries me to the nearest doctor. Ultimately it comes down to choice. It’s not something that can be taught because it depends on who and what and when. Some people don’t want to get up unassisted because it takes more resolve, strength, and belief than they have in them at that given point in time. And that’s ok. There are times when I have battled within my own mind about whether I need a crane to pick up my zombie-fied existence and dump me back in the fetal position in the comfort of my own bed. And trust me, I have been there. Not within this cancer diagnosis, but a time not so long ago that serves as a constant reminder that at one point in my life, I gave in. Because I needed to.
There is something powerful about surrender. It’s about accepting that sometimes stuff feels a bit bigger than just you. While I would have got an A for Acceptance, the resiliency test score would have come up with a big fat F for Fail. But yet I see it as one of my greatest accomplishments. The fact that I did collapse, I allowed myself to stay down for the count when the TKO was declared, and at some point when I felt I could trust my body to lift my limbs, and my belief in my gut that I could move my legs forward, I got up. It’s a critical part of my story and how I ended up where I am right now. My ability now is to take all that has come my way and wrap it up in a pledge to find where this path may lead, because I clearly didn’t get the message from my previous time in Life’s boxing ring.
What I did learn was that resiliency comes from within. From experience. From belief. And ultimately from the choice we make on a particular day. My choice for today is to get up. My choice for tomorrow is to believe that I can and will get up. And if I can’t, my choice is to nurture and trust that my body is getting exactly what it needs… rest. So that the next day, I can start again.
