Bouncing Back, or Building Resiliency through Adversity
A few years ago—five years if we’re counting, and we are—I called my doctor for the results of a recent biopsy. When the receptionist told me that the doctor wanted to speak with me in person, I knew that whatever came next was not going to be good. I made my way out of the office to an area that was slightly more private and tried to hold myself together. As I suspected, the news was not good. In fact, it was terrifying. The biopsy confirmed what my doctor had already known: I had inflammatory breast cancer.
Bad things happen to good people. It’s a fact of life. However, it’s not what happens to us so much as how we respond and build resiliency to what we encounter. Do we learn? Do we improve? How exactly do we “bounce back?”
Bounce back in Four steps
It took me a couple of years, some deep thinking, and a lot of reflection on this issue, and here is what I’ve learned. This is the bounce-back formula that works for me:
Acknowledge, name, fully feel (okay, wallow in) what hurts.
Focus on and appreciate something small, something good (in other words, what is working right now).
What is a different perspective?
How can I respond to this challenge, not react to it?
Let’s break this down a bit further.
Acknowledge What Hurts
I drink green juice! I am a (mostly) good person! I floss—regularly, not just before I go to the dentist! So how on earth did I roll into 2015 with breast cancer?
Fortunately, my oncologist was able to answer that: rotten luck.
But luck, rotten or otherwise, wasn’t much comfort. The first few days were awful, and by awful I mean terrified and frantic and feeling like I was being crushed under something monumental. I could not keep a coherent line of thinking, my hands trembled, and there were a few evenings huddled in a chair with one of our dogs. My husband confiscated my phone so that I could not Google statistics and outcomes obsessively.
And then…then I surrendered. I admitted to and then leaned into the hurt and the terror and then finally, finally I surrendered. I felt it all, fully, and acknowledged that it was okay for me to feel that way. The acknowledgement didn’t make the feelings go away, but it did legitimize them. Acknowledgement made me feel less crazy, less reactive, that I could take back some of the control that I felt that I had lost. By giving voice to what hurt, it took a tiny bit of the sting away.
Find Something Good—and Appreciate It
Now might be a good time to mention that on the same day I was having my port installed (this is how those lovely chemotherapy drugs are administered now, not an IV in your arm that blows out your veins), our house was trying to kill us. We had discovered a major water leak under the floor, so as we drove to the hospital, a crew of men was carving door-sized holes into the walls to reroute the plumbing from under the foundation through the ceiling. This was not exactly the send-off for which either of us had hoped.
Things with the house were about to get a whole lot worse. The floor leak had resulted in black mold that had spread throughout half of the house. We returned home from the hospital to a greater number of workmen than we had left. Most of them were shoveling out soggy, mold-infested flooring and installing fans. Those that were not shoveling were actively demolishing one of our two bathrooms, and a toilet and sink and bathtub were laid to rest in our garage.
You know, because chemotherapy is the BEST time to drop to a single bathroom in a house with multiple occupants.
I have to be honest: it didn’t feel like we had much of anything good in our corner at that moment. I knew that I needed to look for something good, however, because it was either that or go back to being crushed by everything that wasn’t so good. So, what was working?
Well, I was young, and other than having cancer, I was in pretty good shape. Plus, scans were showing that cancer had not metastasized or entered my lymphatic system. (In oncology, less is generally better.)
Our dogs didn’t really see a difference in me. They smothered me with the same love that they always had.
We had insurance, both health insurance as well as homeowners’ insurance. We had no idea what the financial repercussions of a year like 2015 would be, but…we had insurance.
Friends, family, coworkers, people in general looked out for me, even when I was too sick and exhausted to take care of myself.
It’s like BJ Fogg’s work on tiny habits: if I start the day, looking for and acknowledging the good things in my life, my mindset begins to shift. I did have some good things happening. I just had to go a bit further out of my way to find them. But good things were there, hiding in plain sight.
A Different Perspective
I’ve long been in the practice of talking with my dad while out hiking our dogs. While on one of these afternoon jaunts, he said, “I think that it takes a lot of courage to go through what you are doing.”
“I don’t know that it is courage so much as a lack of options, Dad” I responded, wryly, sardonically.
True, I may not have had a lot of options with regards to cancer, but Dad’s comment illustrated that I had a choice in the perspective that I took. I could do the following:
Think of my admittedly limited options as trapping me
Face this whole thing with courage and see what I could make of it
Notice what happened there? My world may have taken a tumble, but a different mindset, a new perspective that I chose helped me to keep myself out of the pit of despair.
I spent much of 2015 trying on different perspectives. Rather than being fearful of what surgeons might say, I began to view consults as curiosity sessions. I’d already met my out-of-pocket maximums for the year by March, so why not use these sessions to get a deeper understanding of what they were doing. Rather than bemoan the unforeseen remodeling project, we got to pretend-camp in our house for six months.
Different perspectives are a choice, a mindful choice. What perspective do you choose to stand in?
Respond, Not React
As a longtime agile coach, one of the questions I have long asked teams is “How can we respond, not react, to this change?”
Remember that toilet that was rerouted to the garage? I wound up using it as a barber chair. One of my dearest friends came over and shaved my head for me once we knew that my long, curly hair was about to become a plumbing nightmare. We smiled at one another, teared up only a little, and got on with it.
A reaction would have been sobbing in the shower as handfuls of hair came away. A response was a deep breath and firing up the clippers. We took stock of the situation, saw what needed to be done, and then did it.
The next time you face a dilemma, I encourage you to stop, take a deep breath, and then ask yourself if you are reacting or responding. How you answer that question will help you better understand your own resilience.
Wrapping Up
Clearly, the whole cancer/house-trying-to-kill-us year worked out for us. I’ve now passed five years of nary an oncological incident, and our house is intact with flooring and two functioning bathrooms. I used what I learned from that year to change careers, ultimately launching my own coaching and consulting practice. While I don’t want to do cancer ever again, I am grateful for what the experience taught me, how it made me better understand my own resilience.
The point that I’m trying to make is this: life happens. Shit happens. It’s not personal, it’s just the way it is. But just because life gets shitty doesn’t mean that it will always be shitty. It will pass, but hopefully, the lessons we learn will not. As humans, we’ll bounce back more quickly and with greater resilience when we ask ourselves good, hard questions and learn to respond, not react.
The image used for the title of this blog post was captured by Linda Nickell. Connect with her on Instagram as @coznlinda, or join in for the next Happiness Hour. Details and schedules can be found on her site.