Resilience

 I've been thinking a lot about resilience lately. It's one of those words we hear everywhere. Academics talk about it. Scientists study it. Motivational speakers build entire careers around it. Yet despite how common the term is, I'm not convinced everyone means the same thing when they use it.

In academia, resilience is generally defined as a person's ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, change, or hardship. Modern thinking goes a step further and recognises that resilience is not simply an individual trait. It is influenced by relationships, communities, opportunities, resources, culture, identity, and the environments we live in.

Scientists often apply the concept more broadly. An ecosystem can be resilient. A bridge can be resilient. A biological system can be resilient. In simple terms, resilience is the ability of a system to absorb disruption and continue functioning despite stress or adversity.

Then there is the motivational speaker version.

You know the one.

"Fall down seven times, stand up eight."

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

"Never quit."

There is certainly value in perseverance and determination. I would never deny that. But these explanations often place the responsibility entirely on the individual. They can overlook the reality that people do not face hardship on a level playing field. Poverty exists. Trauma exists. Disability exists. Discrimination exists. Opportunity is not distributed equally.

This is one of the reasons I find myself drawn to the social work understanding of resilience.

Social workers tend to view resilience through a person-in-environment lens. Rather than asking only what makes an individual resilient, we also ask what supports, relationships, communities, opportunities, and resources helped make resilience possible in the first place.

When somebody survives adversity, social workers are interested not only in their strengths but also in the people and systems that stood alongside them.

When I look at my own life, this perspective makes far more sense to me than either the scientific definition or the motivational mumbo jumbo.

I was born in Poland while it was still behind the Iron Curtain. I was fortunate to be surrounded by loving parents, a protective older brother, and an extended family who never defined me by my physical disability. To them, I wasn't a disabled child. I wasn't a person with a disability. I wasn't a person with lived experience of disability. I was simply Piotr, a child who occasionally needed assistance.

I should probably acknowledge here that I use all three of those terms interchangeably. Depending on the context, I may refer to myself as a disabled person, a person with a disability, or a person with lived experience of disability. They each capture something slightly different, and over the years I've become less interested in finding the "correct" term and more interested in respecting how people choose to describe themselves.

The Polish health system, on the other hand, approached things differently. Much of my childhood involved attempts to make me fit a square hole. For the first seven years of my life, I seemed to spend as much time in hospitals as I did at home. Physiotherapy was intensive and relentless, with the hope that I would one day be able to stand independently and perhaps walk.

Then my parents made the decision that changed the course of my life. We immigrated to New Zealand in 1984-1985.

The approach here was very different.

Rather than focusing exclusively on trying to "fix" my mobility, New Zealand's solution was comparatively simple: provide me with a motorised wheelchair and remove many of the barriers created by limited mobility. Suddenly the question was not whether I could walk enough, but how I could participate.

It also meant far less intensive physiotherapy.

Looking back, that seemingly simple change represented two very different ways of understanding disability. One focused primarily on impairment. The other focused more on function, participation, and access.

If you were so inclined, we could easily disappear down that rabbit hole and spend hours discussing the differences between the medical model, the social model, and the many other largely Anglo-Western frameworks that have shaped disability theory and practice. If we did, I would quietly insist that we also make room for Indigenous perspectives and models of understanding disability, community, and wellbeing. Perhaps that is a future post. Given that my publisher and fellow writers continue to encourage me to write blogs about my writing and whatever else happens to capture my interest, I suspect I may eventually get around to it.

Neither approach was perfect, but it transformed what was possible for me.

I arrived in New Zealand with only a handful of English words. The rest I learned the same way many migrant children learn a new language: in playgrounds, classrooms, and among friends. Children can be remarkably effective language teachers without ever realising they're teaching.

As I reflect on those early years, I realise that resilience was never something I developed alone.

My resilience came from parents who refused to give up.

It came from family who saw a person before they saw a disability.

It came from teachers who encouraged me.

In fact, I can think of at least two teachers who went a step further. They gave me no quarter.

My late art teacher, in particular, made sure I never had it too easy. If the rest of the class was drawing on A5 paper with a pencil, then Piotr was going to draw on A5 paper with a pencil as well, even if it meant finding a different way to do it. Expectations were not lowered simply because I had a disability. If I got into trouble, I was just as likely to find myself in the headmaster's office or serving detention as anyone else.

When I told people I could sail a P-class yacht on my own, they didn't respond by explaining all the reasons it might be too difficult. They put a lifejacket on me and said, "Go have fun."

The fact that I capsized the damn thing twenty minutes later was beside the point.

Although being barred from the shore for the remainder of the trip was probably fair enough.

If I wanted to try improv theatre, the answer was yes.

If I wanted to have a go at something new, the answer was usually yes.

Throughout much of my childhood, I was not treated as someone who needed to be wrapped in cotton wool. I was expected to participate, contribute, make mistakes, learn from them, and occasionally suffer the consequences of my own overconfidence.

The same was true of many of the health and social service professionals I encountered along the way. The best of them did not try to script my life for me. Instead, they gave me room to explore, experiment, fail, recover, and experience many of the ordinary things that non-disabled people often take for granted.

Then came university.

Along with university came parties, questionable life decisions, and, if I'm being completely honest, some fairly dreadful grades.

At one point, I realised I wanted to enter the Postgraduate Diploma in Social Work programme.

There was just one problem.

My grades were, to put it diplomatically, not exactly helping my case.

Fortunately, an education lecturer saw something in me that I had not yet fully seen in myself. He suggested a different pathway. If I completed a Diploma for Graduates first, effectively turning my Bachelor of Arts into a double degree, and could demonstrate solid academic performance, then I would be in a much stronger position to apply.

So I did.

I worked hard, earned a few A grades, maintained a B average overall, and reapplied.

This time I got in.

Looking back, I don't see that story as evidence of some extraordinary personal resilience. What I see are people who challenged me, encouraged me, refused to lower expectations, and occasionally helped me find another path when the first one wasn't working.

Once again, resilience was not something I achieved alone.

It was something built through relationships, opportunities, guidance, and people who believed I was capable of more than I sometimes believed myself.

The same can be said of my writing.

I've wanted to write ever since I first picked up a Richard Herman Jr. novel and, a few years later, an early copy of David Weber's On Basilisk Station while I was in third or fourth form at high school. Those books captured my imagination in a way that few things had before. They made me want to tell stories of my own.

If I'm being completely honest, part of the appeal was probably that I could create heroes who could walk, run, jump, fight, and do all the things I couldn't physically do myself. Through writing, I could explore possibilities, adventures, and worlds unrestricted by the realities of my own body.

Along the way I met some wonderful people, some of whom I remain in contact with to this day. They encouraged me, critiqued my work, and helped me improve. Like most writers, I accumulated my share of rejection letters, false starts, unfinished manuscripts, and moments of self-doubt.

But it wasn't until Canon Publishing, then a new small press, decided to take a chance on me that things really began to change. Someone looked at my work and thought it was worth the risk.

Three Ravens Publishing followed, and more recently, Defiant House Entertainment.

All three publishers have one thing in common: they never treated my disability as a defining feature of my writing. They nurtured me as a writer, challenged me as a writer, and expected me to improve as a writer. They reminded me, in their own ways, that my disability meant diddly-doo-daa when it came to the quality of the stories I was putting on the page.

Because people believed in me, I kept writing.

Because people challenged me, I improved.

Because people invested their time, energy, and expertise, I grew.

Thanks to them, I have written Dragoon: First Strike, Asset Denied, the first of the Gene Bukowski Files, and collaborated with Michael LaVoice on a trilogy of books.

Again, I see the same pattern that has appeared throughout much of my life.

Parents.

Teachers.

Friends.

Mentors.

Lecturers.

Publishers.

Colleagues.

People who encouraged me, challenged me, guided me, and occasionally gave me a swift kick up the backside when I needed it.

That is why I struggle when resilience is presented as some kind of superpower that people either possess or lack.

My experience has taught me that resilience is rarely an individual achievement. More often, it is a collective one.

As a social worker, educator, author, and person with lived experience of disability, I have come to believe that resilience is not about never struggling. It is not about endlessly overcoming obstacles through willpower alone.

Sometimes resilience is adaptation.

Sometimes resilience is persistence.

Sometimes resilience is asking for help.

Sometimes resilience is surviving long enough to see circumstances improve.

Sometimes resilience is acknowledging that you cannot do everything on your own.

And sometimes resilience is recognising that the problem is not a lack of resilience, but the barriers that make resilience necessary in the first place.

Perhaps that is the greatest lesson my life has taught me.

Resilience is not something that exists entirely within us. It is found in families, friendships, communities, cultures, opportunities, and acts of kindness both large and small. It is nurtured by people who believe in us when we struggle to believe in ourselves.

For all the academic definitions, scientific explanations, and motivational slogans, that is what resilience means to me.

I am resilient because people believed in me.

I am resilient because people took the time to guide me.

I am resilient because I have loving parents, a wife, an extended family, and a network of friends and colleagues who see value in what I bring to the table.

I am resilient because others made space for me to fail, learn, grow, and try again.

I am resilient because I know I have value.

I am resilient because I know I am not alone.

And perhaps that, more than anything else, is what resilience really is.

Not toughness.

Not grit.

Not some magical quality possessed only by extraordinary people.

It is connection.

It is community.

It is belonging.

And because of that, I have never been resilient alone.

Standing Together, Being Seen and Unseen

 Last week I had the privilege of flying to Wellington to attend the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers (ANZASW) Conference. This year's theme was Standing Together, a simple phrase carrying a surprisingly powerful message in a world that is simultaneously becoming more diverse and more individualistic.

Like any worthwhile adventure, the trip had its moments.

One evening I headed out for dinner with my fellow ANZASW Board members. The venue had supposedly been confirmed as wheelchair accessible. On arrival, however, we discovered that "accessible" apparently meant "there are only one or two steps."

The restaurant manager helpfully informed me that there was a side entrance I could use.

The side entrance also had a step.

Fortunately, a wooden cutting board appeared and was promptly repurposed into a makeshift ramp. Problem solved.

I remember sitting there quietly amazed that someone genuinely thought one or two steps qualified as wheelchair friendly. It was a reminder that accessibility is often not about grand policy statements or expensive modifications. Sometimes it is simply about understanding what a barrier actually is.

Thankfully, the rest of the trip was much smoother.

The Wellington Quarter Hotel was excellent. The accessible room featured a large shower area, a complimentary shower chair, and, perhaps best of all, it was located on the sixth floor rather than hidden away on the ground floor. The view looked out over the surrounding hills, making it a genuinely pleasant place to return to after a full day of conference sessions.

The conference itself offered some fantastic networking opportunities. I came away with direct contact details for a couple of university professors in attendance, opening doors for future conversations and collaborations. One of the great strengths of conferences is that you often arrive expecting to learn and leave having connected with people you never expected to meet.

Yet when I reflect on the week, what stays with me most is not the networking, the accommodation, or even the accessibility mishaps.

What stays with me is an idea.

The idea of being seen and unseen at the same time.

That thought crystallised as I listened to Eugene Ryder KSM speak. Eugene's life story is extraordinary. As a child, he experienced severe abuse in state care. He spent time on the streets, became involved with Black Power, offended as a young man, and served time in prison before he was old enough to vote. Yet he later returned to education as an adult, gained a social work degree, became a respected community advocate, worked alongside the Abuse in Care Royal Commission, and was eventually awarded the King's Service Medal for his service supporting survivors and marginalised communities. Today he continues to advocate for those whose voices are often overlooked. 

As I listened to Eugene speak, I found myself unexpectedly overwhelmed.

There are conference presentations that are informative.

Then some presentations reach through your professional armour and punch you squarely in the soul.

This was one of those.

I will freely admit that I became a little teary-eyed listening to his kōrero. In truth, part of me wanted nothing more than to disappear somewhere quiet, regroup, and sort through the emotional cyclone that had just smacked me in the face like a wet fish sundae.

Unfortunately, that wasn't really an option.

I was sitting right up the front for Eugene's presentation.

A tactical withdrawal would have been immediately noticeable.

On the plus side, I did get a hug from Eugene afterwards, so I'd say that balanced things out rather nicely.

One comment Eugene made particularly resonated with me. He spoke about walking a "thin line" between different worlds, never fitting neatly into one camp or another. Being seen as belonging to one group while simultaneously never fully belonging there at all.

Listening to him, I realised that many of us carry our own version of that experience.

For me, that experience is disability.

I have spent more than fifteen years working professionally across disability, trauma, teaching, customer service, and quality management. Alongside that sits nearly half a century of lived experience as a disabled person.

For a long time, I viewed those as separate things. One was my professional life and the other was simply my personal experience.

Over time I have come to realise that they are inseparable.

My disability is not something I work around in practice.

It is one of the tools I bring to it.

Throughout my career I have found that my disability has often helped me connect with people in ways that another practitioner might struggle to. Clients who may have been guarded around an average male practitioner were often willing to engage with me. Sometimes they saw me as less threatening. Sometimes they recognised vulnerability. Sometimes they simply recognised that I knew what it was like to experience life from outside the mainstream.

My disability creates a bridge.

These days I have stopped thinking of it as something separate from my professional identity. In fact, let's call it what it is:

My otherness.

My otherness is not a weakness.

It is not an obstacle.

It is not something to be overcome.

It is one of the secrets of my practice.

The very thing that makes me different is often the thing that allows me to build trust, establish connection, and meet people where they are. It reminds me that every person carries experiences that may not be immediately visible. It helps me look beyond labels because I know what it feels like to be reduced to one.

Perhaps that is why the conference theme, Standing Together, resonated so strongly.

Standing together is not about pretending our differences do not exist.

It is about recognising that our differences matter.

It is about seeing the full person rather than the label attached to them.

It is about understanding that lived experience, trauma, disability, culture, identity, and even our own sense of otherness can become sources of strength rather than barriers to connection.

We are all seen.

We are all unseen.

The challenge is learning to recognise both within ourselves and within others.

That is the thought I carried home from Wellington.

And I suspect it will stay with me for quite some time.

August Has Chosen Violence

Good morning from Dunedin, where Mother Nature appears to have glanced at the calendar, laughed, and carried on regardless. 

Current conditions: 2°C (36°F) with snow in August. That's right, snow. In August. Visibility remains reasonable, though confidence in the seasons is deteriorating rapidly.

Due to the surprise appearance of winter's winter, my wife's campus has officially decided that roads are optional and has moved classes online for the day. Students are advised to attend lectures from secure blanket fortifications with emergency supplies of coffee, tea, and snacks.

In unrelated news, I have just submitted the second instalment in the Gene Bukowski Files, and the first draft of SARCOM Book 3 is officially complete. Coincidence? Probably.

That said, with the current weather situation developing, one has to wonder: can Jack Crowley rescue us from the latest snow dump? Or will he be forced to battle the most relentless antagonist yet, a South Island winter armed with icy roads and horizontal sleet?

Forecast for the rest of the day:

• Cold.
• Still cold.
• Writers making suspiciously good progress indoors.
• Frequent outbreaks of hot beverages.
• A slight chance of fictional heroes being recruited for snow-clearing duties.

Public safety message: Stay frosty... though I'd much rather stay toasty.

Introductions all around

 I've had a busy couple of weeks. In addition to wrapping up the second and third instalments in The Gene Bukowski Files, which I'm hoping will be a kicker and a thinker respectively, I've also started back at university as a tutor for both Social Work and Community Health. The first classes are now well underway, and my Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are going to be divided up with tutorials.

That got me thinking.

Yes, I know. Thinking is normally a dangerous pastime. The headaches afterwards often leave you wondering whether the whole exercise was worth it. But I digress.

I started thinking about introductions. More specifically, how we introduce ourselves and why.

For many of us, particularly those in the 40 to 60-plus bracket, introducing ourselves can seem relatively straightforward. We bring decades of experience, achievements, failures, lessons, and stories with us. We have careers, families, interests, passions, and identities that have had years, sometimes decades, to develop.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, tangata whenua, the Māori people of this land, have long recognised the importance of introduction through the practice of mihimihi. A mihimihi is more than simply stating your name. It is about locating yourself in relation to your whakapapa, your connections, your community, and the places that have shaped who you are. It acknowledges that identity is relational. We are not individuals floating through life in isolation. We belong somewhere, come from somewhere, and are connected to others.

There is something deeply powerful about that.

But what about younger generations?

I found myself asking that question after conducting introduction rounds across my four tutorials. My students were asked to share their name, why they were taking the paper, whether it was part of their degree pathway or simply an area of interest, what they hoped to gain from the tutorials, and what their dreams and aspirations were. To lighten the mood, I also asked them to share their favourite colour.

Simple enough, right?

What surprised me was just how shy many of the students were. Some struggled to answer. Others needed prompting. A few offered only the briefest responses before retreating back into silence.

Although, in hindsight, it probably didn't help that I decided to go first.

When I reached the dreams and aspirations part of my own introduction, I casually mentioned that one of mine was to get up and walk.

The stunned silence that followed was astounding.

You could almost hear the collective gears grinding to a halt.

Eventually, I had to chuckle and break the tension myself.

"Well," I said, "that fell flat."

For those of you who don't know, I use a wheelchair. Yes, I am fully aware that the probability of me suddenly getting up and walking is about as remote as a lion deciding to become a vegetarian. But what's wrong with wanting to get up and go for a walk? It's not as though I said I wanted to run an ultramarathon across the Sahara.

It's still a dream.

It's still an aspiration.

And, as one of the students later pointed out, I'm the one person who gets to decide whether it's possible or not.

Maybe that's part of the challenge when we ask people to talk about their aspirations. We often assume dreams have to be realistic, practical, measurable, and achievable within a clearly defined timeframe. We treat them like goals on a strategic plan rather than things that inspire us, motivate us, or simply capture something we long for.

Perhaps dreams are allowed to be improbable.

After all, if they were guaranteed, they'd probably just be plans.

That experience also made me wonder whether some of my students' reluctance wasn't simply shyness. There are probably several psychological and psychosocial explanations.

For starters, emerging adulthood is a period of identity formation. Many young adults are still figuring out who they are, what they believe, and where they see themselves heading. Questions about future goals and aspirations can feel surprisingly confronting when you're still working out your place in the world.

There's also the reality of social anxiety and fear of judgement. Today's students have grown up in an age where much of their communication happens through screens rather than face-to-face interactions. Standing up in front of a room full of strangers and talking about yourself can feel vulnerable.

Then there's the pressure to have everything figured out. Society often tells young people they should already know what career they want, what success looks like, and where they're heading. Being asked to talk about aspirations in front of peers can sometimes feel less like an invitation and more like a test.

What struck me most, though, was that every student had something worth saying.

Behind the hesitant answers and nervous smiles were stories, experiences, ambitions, and hopes. Every one of them had travelled a unique path into that classroom. Every one of them had something to contribute.

Perhaps that is one of the real purposes of introductions.

Not simply to exchange names, but to create connections.

To acknowledge that every person in the room belongs there.

To begin transforming a room full of strangers into a learning community.

By the end of the tutorials, most students were noticeably more relaxed. Some were chatting with classmates. Others were asking questions. The awkwardness had started to fade.

Maybe introductions are not really about telling people who we are.

Maybe they are about giving ourselves permission to be known.

And perhaps that is why mihimihi remains so significant. It reminds us that identity is not something we perform. It is something we share. Through sharing it, we invite others to do the same.

So I'll leave you with a question. How do you introduce yourself? Do you lead with what you do, where you come from, who your people are, or where you hope to go?

And while you're at it, what's your favourite colour? Mine's blue. After four tutorials, apparently that's the important question.

Three

 I've come to realise something important: I currently have three writing projects underway.

The first is The Bukowski Files, featuring Asset Denied, which is already live. This is an espionage thriller series featuring a character who has been with me for a long time. I have plans for a six-novel series, with each instalment being a short novel.

The second series, SARCOM, co-written with Michael Lavoice. The proof of concept for this series was a short story, also co-written with Michael, which appears in the Face the Storm anthology. You can find the anthology linked here, or by clicking on the cover to your right.

The third project is Dragoon, which I first self-published before it was picked up by Three Ravens about two years ago. This is a military science fiction series that depicts a worldwide alien invasion from the perspective of the New Zealand Defence Forces' mech pilots. You can find the first book here, on the column to your right of the blog:

I really enjoyed writing this series and hope to return to the characters in the future. As for the release dates? They will be coming soon. I know Three Ravens has other titles in the pipeline, so it’s just a waiting game.

Looking backward to go forward, fourteen years on

I recently had a really interesting conversation with the editor and publisher at Defiant House—the team behind the scenes who turned Gene Bukowski’s adventure into the ebook you may have already heard about. We talked about the kinds of topics I could share on this blog, especially now that I’ve come to value my privacy more over the past couple of years.

Truth be told, I think I’ll make it up as I go along.

That conversation got me thinking, and I found myself revisiting some of my old blog posts—mainly because, well, I had some time on my hands and it was lunchtime. In doing so, I came across a real gem: my very first blog post, written back in 2012. Have a look.

That year was a particularly interesting time in my life. The post reflects on a difficult period marked by self-doubt and unemployment after completing my Master’s in Social and Community Work. Despite having strong qualifications and sending out countless job applications, I couldn’t secure work. It led me to question my worth and abilities.

Now, fourteen years on, things have improved on all fronts.

The central insight from that post still holds true: running away doesn’t solve underlying challenges. Instead, it’s about facing them head-on and moving forward. Life, after all, isn’t meant to be lived by constantly looking backward.

Feel free to check it out.

A quick look back

 

I believe it’s been about a week since "Asset Denied," the first book in The Gene Bukowski Files, went live on Amazon. I thought it would be a good time to share where it all started and why.

The first question you might be asking is, who is Gene Bukowski? He is a legacy character who has been with me for a very long time. My editor can confirm that they first encountered him twenty-five years ago as the main character in a story set on Mars, where he chased bad guys and drove buggies. In a way, Bukowski was a version of me—how I envisioned myself if I were not a wheelchair user, or more accurately, how I saw myself without the limitations of disability.

You could say that Bukowski’s initial appearance was little more than a "Mary Sue" character; he represented me in a way.

Over time, I evolved. I finished university, earned a master’s degree in social and community work, worked, fell in love, got married, lost my job, faced health challenges, secured another job, encountered more health issues, and eventually found stable work again. Throughout this journey, I continued writing. Bukowski finally made it into a book, but while it was decent, the rights reverted back to me after a year, and the book was taken down. Once again, Bukowski was buried. During this time, I had "Dragoon: First
Strike" was published through Three Ravens, and I also collaborated on a short story that is now being developed into a trilogy with Michael Lavoice.

I wanted to revisit Bukowski and decided to rewrite his story with a different setting. After I completed the rewrite, I asked Michael to read it, secretly hoping he would advise me to put it away. Instead, he loved it. When I discovered that my old mentor was an editor at another small press that favoured short-length works, I submitted the manuscript to them. You can read their feedback here.

So, who is Bukowski now? He’s still an undercover agent, but his character has much more depth than it did twenty-five-plus years ago. I really hope you’ll enjoy "Asset Denied." Please consider leaving a review once you’ve finished, as I would greatly appreciate your feedback.