Facing Our Life’s “Monsters” Is How We Become Resilient
“Be brave, John.” Each of my parents said it to me, decades apart, in different but extremely distressing circumstances.
My dad said it during what turned out to be our last face-to-face conversation when he was nearing the end of his battle with throat cancer at only 52 years old. I was 30 at the time. I told him I had by then already lost friends in the AIDS epidemic, but I had only one father—and I had no experience, yet, of how to live in a world without him. Be brave, he said.
What is bravery? Courage? What do they have to do with resilience?
The ancient Greek philosophers, tutors of humankind, were very interested in the virtue of courage. Aristotle in particular wrote in detail about it. The Greek word for courage, tharros, is translated as mettle, guts, nerve, heart, or spunk—common qualities of a resilient person.
It’s important to understand that the Greeks did not equate courage with being fearless; quite the opposite. For Aristotle, the courageous person is both fearful and bold. S/he is aware of the challenge and risk in facing whatever “monster” might be impeding his/her safe passage in life—but makes a deliberate choice to move forward in spite of that awareness. Making that choice has much to do with confidence in her or his ability to survive the encounter based on past experience.
The 5th-century Greek historian Thucydides put it this way: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.”
Nelson Mandela rephrased this idea in the 21st century. “I learned,” wrote Mandela, “that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
Courage lets us face life’s “monsters”—including our traumas and losses—with the confidence that we can survive and thrive in spite of them, that better times lie just ahead. It keeps us moving forward rather than wallowing in our fear of the uncertainty that may be facing us.
We develop this confidence as each courageous choice we make shows us more and more “what we are made of,” our mettle, guts, heart—take your pick. You might say we become resilient, and practice emotional management, through the accumulation of our choices to behave courageously.
My scariest personal monster was a microscopic beast called human immunodeficiency virus, HIV for short. After my diagnosis in 2005, I was more terrified than I have ever been of anything in my life.
I knew a great deal about HIV because I had been writing about it for 20 years by the time of my diagnosis, which is why I was so scared of it. I had seen what it does to people, to my friends—the terrible disfiguring illness, the death. I also knew the potentially serious side effects of the medications I had to start taking right away.
Yet through my fear, I couldn’t shake a strong sense that somehow I would get through this crisis. My resourcefulness had always served me well, and I believed it would pull me through this tremendously challenging and scary medical “before” and “after” moment in my life. Somehow, I believed I would reach a stable place where I would be able to live well with HIV—just as effective medical treatment has allowed millions of people like me to do.
I had held off telling Mom about my HIV diagnosis until I felt fairly confident the medication I had to start taking right away was going to keep the virus in check, and that I wouldn’t have serious side effects from the medication itself—which could include serious liver and kidney damage. In fact, I was very worried about this happening. “Be brave, John,” she said.
I pressed on because that’s all I really knew how to do—and it was exactly what Mom herself modeled for me throughout her life. I was already quite resilient, after so many years of surviving and thriving after earlier challenges. I didn’t have a sense of doing anything I hadn’t already done throughout my life. The confidence I had developed along the way, as I’d faced each of my earlier losses and traumas, let me face this monster head-on.
Today we tend to use the words "brave," “courageous” and “heroic” interchangeably. This is fitting as each word is a good synonym for the others. It's also a reason I frequently talk about the importance of making ourselves the heroes of our life stories. Resilience has so much to do with telling our stories as heroic tales of our own courage and survival and not as tales of misery and woe.
Fifteen years later, medication continues to keep my microbial beast under control. Nevertheless, I am certain other monsters will leap into my path in the days and years ahead. I will hope the resilience I have developed from my many previous encounters with monsters will keep sustaining me, that I will rise courageously to meet the challenges that await as I continue on my own heroic journey.