Thanks for reading For the Birds! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours. Paid readers gain access to The Resiliency Circle & receive nourishment all month long: prompts, stories, and tools to support you in bringing creativity to the surface of your days, always with sustainability + enchantment in mind.
Resilience is a multi-directional quality
As an academic turned social worker turned self-employed Creativity Coach—aka an intellectual weirdo artist with a bent for service work—I’m naturally drawn to thinking about what I do in terms of frameworks. I especially like having words that become more than description, that serve as guideposts and anchors for keeping me driven and focused, respectively.
Over the last few years, I’ve latched onto one in particular: resilience. It steers my coaching & mentorship, guides my facilitation, and keeps popping its head up in my own creative and therapeutic journey.
In particular, I see it moving in two key directions, in both my own life and the lives of my clients:
1) We can build resilience in order to maintain contact with our creative channel more often. Rather than assuming we have to feel good or hopeful or 100% inspired in order to turn to the page, we can practice turning to the page during harder times, too. When we’re dysregulated, for example, or when we’re feeling far away from our personhood. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself, as a neurodivergent human with complex PTSD, losing track of my own agency, an emotional slump I am prone to falling into. But if I can just manage to get my hand around a pen and near a page of my journal…poof! A few sentences later and there she is. There I am.
Yes: over time, the page can become an anchoring place, not a place you need to pay entry to with a good mood or a brilliant idea or an audience constantly in mind.
2) We can build resilience through our creative channel, through the practices of writing and journaling and art-making. Our creativity is, after all, where our greatest sensitivities reside, which means our wounds & gifts live there, too. We can bring our hardships, existential quandaries, and moments of doubt or disbelief to the page—that private, boundaried space, where we’re not obligated to make sense or prove our worth—and we can just: write. Write and explore and be and discover and wonder and try on. We can practice being with uncertainty, if not with affection then at least with neutrality. Then, we can take that practice and bring it into other areas of life, too.
This is how we create—how we write out way toward—acceptance, the kind that’s anchored by personhood and growth.
Resilience + collaboration
I like talking about resilience + creativity, then, because it’s about more than just the toughness that has allowed us to survive. Sure, it’s about strength and getting through, building our tolerance for hard human things, but it’s also about the flexibility and attention-paying that can allow us to flourish. Now we’re talking about agency, substance, and self-possession alongside suffering, maybe even conjuring that rebellious strain of joy that can only result from collaborating with, but not succumbing to, hard feelings.
Because here’s the thing about resilience: it isn’t refusal. Resilience doesn’t expect you to tough things out or fake it till you make it. It does not ask you to deny or avoid, to grow invulnerable skin, or to conquer or battle anything.
(Look at all those words of negation! And aggression! I have no space for such vocabulary in my life anymore. Do you?)
Resilience is an alongside kind of trait, that quality we build that helps us move through difficulty by being with difficult. It’s a collaborative word, and collaboration is vital for creative health.
As a writer, can my occasional agony exist in collaboration with my unbridled creative impulse?
As a sensitive person, can the porousness that causes me to be more impacted by the world’s harshness exist alongside that which allows me to be deeply moved by a bug, or a good sigh, or the same wind chimes I hear every day?
As a creative soul, can my disappointment over certain outcomes exist in close proximity to my self-trust?
Resilience whispers in my ear: yes, both. It says: good things are possible if we can be in relationship with the cause of our suffering.
I don’t mean to suggest that any of this is easy. It is only through years of therapy, coaching, self-study, and devotion to healing that I’ve cultivated just enough of the internal safety needed to be able to sit with hard things rather than (quite reasonably!) show them the door.
What I mean to suggest is that this work is possible. This work is a practice and an experiment and a showing-up. It will be messy. But also? Startling. Remarkable. Wildly artistic. It will not be easy, but it will be good, and it will be real.
Resilience + discernment
Building resilience allows us to become more comfortable with the inevitable difficulties of the human contract of existence, but it also helps us get clearer on which difficulties are necessary—like grief, or anger—and which ones are extra. If you’re a sensitive creative soul, you’ve likely experienced a slew of extra hardships: you’ve struggled with inherited stories that weren’t written with your wellbeing in mind, and painful instances of social conditioning, and frameworks built on hierarchy & external validation.
The particular kind of strength that we’re building when we build resilience is also the kind that helps us cultivate discernment, that ability to distinguish between hard feelings that we simply need to move through, and ones that indicate there’s deeper unlearning to be done.
It’s the difference between feeling a temporary amount of grief or disappointment when the journal you love doesn’t publish your essay, and reading a rejection letter as evidence that you’re not a worthy writer after all.
Creativity thrives when we are in relationship with the world—and with ourselves
Here’s Alan Watts, from Become What You Are:
The point is that our feelings are not really a kind of resistance, a kind of fight with the course of events. They are a harmonious and intelligent response.
I feel like my chest is a wicker basket, the lid having flown wide open. Everything in there feels grassy and restful and summery. You mean my feelings aren’t necessarily…bad or wrong?!
The resilient option: To be in relationship with the feelings, whatever they are. To lament them when they are lamentable, but to accept them always. To tend the self who feels such difficulties rather than trying to build a self who doesn’t.
And here’s Lama Rod Owens:
“We have to understand that at some point we have to develop an attitude of needing to love everything, especially what is unlovable, everything has to be loved if you’re interested in getting free.”
Resilience. It isn’t about feeding the myth of the tortured genius, nor is it about bypassing trauma or hard feelings.
It’s about being in relationship with the real world around us—with the full scope of our and each other’s humanity. We get to be in relationship with every aspect of our experience, not just the pretty, social media-friendly parts.
Meanwhile, we build and build and build so much devotion to the impulse to make art, to be creative, and to follow our enthusiasm, that the external obstacles and disappointments are never louder than the thing inside of us that says, okay, but keep going.
Meanwhile, we stop reading the hard things as indications of anything other than what they are: Hard things! Hard things, but not all things.
Speaking of resilience…
I made something new! And I’m excited to offer it as a free resource. Click here to sign-up for “Creative Resilience: a self-guided course.” I crafted this 4-week email series for folks looking to lay the foundation for a healthier, more playful relationship with their creativity, one that prioritizes your terms.
Whether you’re a seasoned writer or artist, or someone just trying to get back to the page, this email course will lead you there through a strengths-based, nourishing lens.
Thank you for writing about one my favorite topics, and introducing it to me in a new way. While resiliency can be born from rough and tumble emotions and experiences, in the natural world, I find resilient plants, animals, and habitats arise from positive evolution, wise behavior, and time. The ancient forests are much more adaptable to surviving fire than seedlings and young trees. By planting trees that are regionally native, but not locally native, we have had success growing ponderosa pine trees on the west side of Oregon as dryer and warm weather becomes the norm. The softest material on our planet, water, is resistant to rocks and boulders, but the hardened minerals yield to water over time. I find it most difficult to find strength alone; it comes easier within community interaction and service, friends, family, and time in nature. Resilience arises through creative outlets, spiritual centeredness, and making others stronger. It is deepened when we come out of a rough life patch and respond positively and with an understanding, a certainty, that we are better able to cope the next time we are faced with similar challenges.