How do we define creative resilience? Part One: Emotional resilience

Holding on when times get tough: the resilient author's perspective

Welcome to new subscribers this week and apologies to those of you who got an email welcoming you to Novel Thoughts & Wild Ideas! I thought I’d caught everything that needed changing in the rebrand, but I missed that one! To quickly recap: the new format of The Resilient Author is a weekly post on a different aspect of writing and author life, and you can see the general topics I cover either on my homepage or in my welcome post. Paid subscribers receive additional posts called ‘Just One More Thing…’, a space where I delve further into topics and offer additional resources.

---

How can we talk usefully about resilience, when our individual recipes for resilience are unique, just as there’s no one fixed path to success? Where do we find resilience when we need it? How do we keep going?

I’ve needed to look for ways of being resilient for much of my life. As I grew up I faced some very challenging circumstances, as so many of us do, and by the time I was in my mid twenties, my life was completely waylaid for a few years by the onset of extreme anxiety and panic attacks. It got to the point where I was bedridden. At one stage my mum called an ambulance. It was an ongoing nightmare, one from which I had no idea how to escape.

And yet I was searching for help everywhere. Reading books, digesting every snippet of wisdom that was offered. Trying everything the doctor suggested: from medication to swimming. (I could have done without the swimming advice to be honest – I lived inland in the UK at the time – and if you’ve been to a public pool there you’ll know it’s not going to lift your spirits much!)

Overall, I felt more and more like a puppet, with no control over myself, just waiting for the strings to be pulled to send me off in the next random, distressing direction. I longed for a magic pill that would make me better, but slowly, through trial and error, I began to understand that there wasn’t one.

The way out was a slow and steady path that included learning how to navigate panic and anxiety (thank god for Claire Weekes’ work and books, which have helped so many people), along with unlearning some really crappy thinking patterns. And I needed to grieve some traumatic events and losses too. Most of all, I had to consistently do the one thing that was NEVER given to me as advice when I was going through all this: to trust myself. And I’m not talking about the kind of trust where you back yourself whatever crap you’re getting up to, I’m talking about the kind of trust where you accept yourself as a complex, fallible, contrary human being, forgive yourself when you can’t live up to your own expectations, ask yourself some tough questions now and again, look for laughter and sunshine whenever possible, and muddle through.

I slowly learned to be more resilient whenever anxiety reared its head, but I got tripped up again when I had my first child, which triggered all sorts of different questions and vulnerabilities. It was a really awful time, but because I’d clawed my way out before, I knew enough to realise that some of the recommended outside interventions would make it worse instead of better – and I resisted and clung on enough to be able to choose my path forward. I adjusted my success benchmark instead – some days my goal was just to have a shower and ensure my baby played, fed and slept on repeat. I told myself that if I allowed each moment just to be what it was, then it wouldn’t last forever. I remembered the things and people that had supported me the last time. I recovered. I learned some more lessons – mostly about being kind to myself again in my new role as mum. And I didn’t go through the same experience when my second child came along.

People always supported me, but no one else saved me. Every time, I had to learn how to save myself.

How does this all apply to writing? Well, I’d bet there are not many of us with a burning desire to write who think of it as just a 9-5 job. The passion to put our ideas and dreams onto the page is a way of being, a vocation that we might dial down for a while, and which sometimes has to take a back seat to life, but it never really leaves us. And yet it requires constant recommitment and soul-searching to sing our hearts out through our words. There’s that little voice too: Who am I to think that my words matter? Who am I to put my thoughts and dreams out into the world? And yet many of us dare to keep going, only to experience that crushing realisation that oftentimes the world either isn’t listening or doesn’t seem to care. It can get very lonely very fast, because there are so many misunderstood aspects about writing a book: from all the effort and extreme hard work it takes to get a good story onto the page, to the idea that anyone who has published a book is rolling in money! Side story: I once taught a group of Year 6 students who were all fascinated to know how much I earned and convinced they were meeting a real-life millionaire! I let them down gently – but I’m still not sure they believed me!

Resilience isn’t something we can purchase or even protect once we find it. Resilience comes from taking our next brave step and continuing on this road for the long haul. It comes from being prepared to listen to advice but only incorporating what’s useful to us. From learning new approaches to better our craft, while adapting to an always changing market. We have to accept the wrong turns, embarrassing moments, and dead ends along the way – remembering that even a dead end always has a route out if we just turn ourselves around. It’s by doing this that we lay brick after brick of hard work and experience while slowly building a foundation. And then we need to keep that foundation strong and secure, whilst seeing what else we can add to it.

Publishing is a hard, contrary and insecure industry, and many of us will at some point struggle from shame, as though if we were somehow smarter or a more talented writer – or perhaps ‘better’ on social media (don’t get me started on this one – but future post alert!) – then we’d more easily thrive. And although we can certainly load the dice to some extent, by working on our craft (because nothing gets the industry more excited than a super strong book) and our business knowledge, in the current traditional publishing set-up there will always be a limit to the time and money available and only a few books will truly soar. Our fortunes will therefore often rise and fall on our sales figures, which are regularly analysed without context (Covid, floods, fires, trail derailments – you name it, I’ve been there in terms of external situations impacting my sales!). No wonder there’s a lot of struggle and burnout in the author world. Therefore, resilience is also about knowing that stepping away for a time – as many authors do at some stage – is not failure. It is sanity saving. It is the definition of self-support and resilience.

A few years ago, I had to stop writing and find some really quick resilience in my personal life. A friend only six months younger than me died from cancer very fast, leaving behind two girls under ten. I experienced this up close - I took her to hospital the day she was diagnosed, I was her next of kin all the way through her illness, her children lived with me for a good portion of the time while she was unwell, and I spoke at her funeral.

My friend’s desperate circumstances were severely impacted by Covid – she didn’t have much family around that could support her, and the ones overseas couldn’t get into the country because of the restrictions. So at the time I really had no choice but to be resilient. I suddenly had four traumatised children under 12 in the house, all far too aware of the circumstances we were in, and a very sick woman depending on me to help her and keep her babies safe while she couldn’t – relying on me not to fall over.

The enduring question I had at that time was: how can I help myself and others be okay, when I am struggling so deeply with the awfulness and injustice of this, and none of it is okay. I had to let go of any long-term goals for a while and instead we learned to take every bit of joy and laughter we could in the moments we could find them. The rest of the time we dug deep, and just kept going.

Because I’d struggled in the past, and this situation was so dire, everyone around me warned me I was taking too much on, and watched nervously, expecting me to crumble. But I didn’t, because I’d learned some tricks from all my years of battling through adversity. And they were things that translate very easily into writing resilience too:

We always got up in the morning with a general plan for the day. Sometimes the plan worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Having a few goals (and not beating ourselves up when it didn’t work) was far more important than whatever we actually achieved. Looking back, the days that didn’t go to plan are jumbled into the days that did, and none of it matters any more.

We kept reprioritising as things occurred.

We couldn’t avoid the tough questions. So we had to work through them, carefully, with honesty and compassion.

We looked for every scrap of joy, every smile, every moment of laughter, and even when they were few and far between, we kept looking.

We prioritised rest, food, health as much as we could, even though it wasn’t always easy.

We forgave ourselves for the things we got wrong.

We let ourselves feel whatever we felt: no emotions were off the table, so that all the horrible ones could pass through us without getting stuck.

And we asked for help and support. As much as possible. Without shame.

Overall, this resilience became a slow and steady gathering of useful resources – whether physical or emotional, practical or spiritual. If something offered hope or encouragement, however small, it was added to the kitbag. When it didn’t work any more, we threw it away. It meant constant readjustment and refocus. A willingness to take a deep, honest look at what we really needed and to balance that with what we could practically afford – because money was really tight too. Rest isn’t always possible when someone needs us or we have to keep an income going. Reinvigoration isn’t immediately achievable when we are run down or overwhelmed. But in the immense challenges of that time, the overall trick seemed to be the same one that I’d found in the past: that I had to be kinder and more forgiving to myself than ever before, while still urging myself on and looking at how I could better support myself - and now and again (not too often) examining where my weak points and blind spots might be.  

There was a moment in amongst it all when I took the kids snorkelling (one of my favourite things to do) – and it was my friend’s children’s first time, so they were nervous. I held one of the girls safely in my arms in the ocean and she bravely adjusted her mask before dipping her head under the water and then gave this adorable squeal of delight as she saw all the fish.  I was filled with joy to be witnessing her first experience of the underwater world, and utterly heartsick knowing I wasn’t the one who should have been holding her, and how fucking unfair it was that my friend was missing out.

I think this is what resilience can become for us in the times we most need it. A chance to acknowledge complexity while holding on to a simple space for ourselves within it, in order to let each moment be exactly what it needs to be.

So, wherever you are on the rollercoaster right now, may you be enjoying your successes without shame, working hard, resting well, or daring to dream of the better days to come.

---

PS Why the nautilus shell at the beginning? I chose it because there are so many symbolic reflections of what we’re experiencing to be found in the natural world, and the helix shape in the nautilus is a symbol of resilience found through nature in every living organism’s DNA. Even our fingerprints have the helix as their underlying structure. Many plants become a helix to pass through environmental challenges: when a plant root comes across a barrier during its growth, it summons energy and flexibility to create a helix, thereby conquering its challenges with beauty, growth and stability. A perfect analogy for the ongoing work of resilience.