RESILIENCE
RESILIENCE
with special guest speaker Bee Quammie
Resilience will be the main thread of Bee’s talk, pulling through to touch on the strengths and pitfalls we face over a lifetime. She will speak to the societal and personal implications of an over-reliance on resilience, but I also touch on what healthy resilience looks like and how healthy goal-setting and self-care can assist with that.
Join us for a talk that’s sure to deliver lots to think about, and leave us with actionable takeaways that can be implemented in each of our lives.
First Reading
Why We Need To Rethink The Way We Talk About Resilience:
Who could we be if we didn’t need to spend energy protecting ourselves against things we shouldn’t have to face in the first place?
By Bee Quammie I September 2, 2021, for Chatelaine.com
I realized that many of the things I’ve had to build resilience against, I shouldn’t have had to face in the first place. It’s true that life isn’t fair. But it’s also true that when we blindly accept the need to be resilient, others are able to conflate the intentionality of oppression with the capriciousness of life.
There are two big problems with the way society has championed resilience. One is that it helps to maintain oppression by cementing it as normal, expected and unavoidable. Racism? Ableism? Misogyny? Transphobia? The reliance on resilience tells us that these are threaded into the fabric of our society, and there’s nothing we can really do to extract them.
The other problem is that leaning on resilience puts additional pressure on the oppressed. Not only do they experience that dehumanization, but then they’re required to do additional work to build up their armour against it. The responsibility to manage said oppression becomes that of the oppressed person, and if you ask me, that goes beyond unfairness and into the sphere of systemic disempowerment. That disempowerment may also play into how we, the eternally resilient, see ourselves. Building up that armour in order to protect and preserve ourselves makes sense, but is a response that can make it more difficult for us to ask for help, open up emotionally, and embrace our vulnerability and softness."
Second Reading
"Let us combine. There are no magics or elves
Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must
Wizard a track through our own screaming weed."
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks