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.