After reflecting last week on how I can challenge myself as a writer, especially when the flow of ideas slows to a trickle, I decided to find a series of writing prompts. This idea came to me after seeing a gift my sister gave my father, a series of prompts to use with the sketchbook he received. So, the night I started writing this entry, I found a list of prompts from the New York Times. This list extends to 550 items. I do not know if I will get through all of them; I certainly will not use them every week. However, I will start with the first prompt and work my way through as many of them as I decide to use starting with the question on my personal resilience. How resilient am I?

I nearly skipped this question.

I nearly went to look for an easier one to start with but then I realized that that very inclination revealed something about my resilience so I set down that rule for myself that I described above and dove in with a little blathering on the front end. Now that I have finished getting myself ready, I dive into my response to the question.

To answer the question, I have to know what I mean by resiliency. Since I live and breath, figuratively of course, education, the first thing that comes to me is the idea of building a resilient child, of helping students deal well with all the adverse childhood experiences they face. This thought influenced my initial inclination to skip the question. I have never endured anything that many people associate with those people highly lauded as resilient. As soon as that thought came to my mind, I rejected it. Using that definition would open the door to the comparison trap. My life looks nothing like anyone else’s, nor should it.

Rather, resiliency in this entry has to do with how I respond to failure or setbacks. I extend this definition to challenging tasks, do I get started or not? Some call resiliency the response to adversity but I have more experience with handling, or not handling, difficult things than events that others consider adverse. Resiliency to me also concerns my attitude when I deal with these issues.

So, how resilient am I?

I find that a difficult question to answer quantitatively, with a lack of description. I think, instead, that I will respond to a few scenarios narratively. If I answered the question in a single sentence I would respond with something like the following. I consider myself somewhat resilient but with a lot of areas of struggle. That lack of specificity bothers me so I will add the specifics below.

One of the first things that came to mind when I saw the question concerns electronics. Back in college or shortly thereafter, I owned an iPod classic with 160 GB of storage. Who needs that much? Only someone as obsessed with podcasts as myself, although, since podcasts had not reached their current popularity, I often alternated between podcasts and audiobooks. I hoarded those podcasts, transferring them from my computer to my iPod as soon as space became available even though I would probably not listen to that particular audio file for months. So, just to try to imagine my dismay when, as all manmade products do, it fails. On three different occasions, my beloved iPod suddenly developed a fault and became completely unreadable, taking with it the entire audio horde. I reacted the same way all three times. I yelled in frustration, threw the now useless hunk of plastic at the floor, and threw a hissy fit. Did this help? Not in the slightest. The only thing this reaction showed me is my lack of initial resiliency in response to set back. I say initial because after I dried my tears and took several deep breaths, I either restored the iPod to factory settings or went online to purchase another. I also became quite adept at locating the archives of all my favorite podcasts so I could download everything I had lost.

College itself forms another example. On the first day of each class, staggered throughout the week, I received the syllabus. Being a neurotic planner, I took each syllabi and wrote all the readings and assignments for the entire semester in my little day planner. Each class added another line to these days so that by the end of the week some days had little black space left. (I always took a full load.) Without fail, every semester I had a moment, usually in my living room next to the same chair, where I completely broke down in tears, sobbing that I would never be able to complete everything, never remembering that I told myself at the end of the prior semester not to freak out because I had ended up getting everything done way ahead of time.

In both of those previous examples, I eventually got over myself and got to work figuring out what I needed to do and then doing it. The other rub comes with “eventually” of the previous sentence. I often have grand plans for what I will accomplish in a certain time period and then end up postponing it all. Even when I approach my lists like a sensible human being and put on the list only what I need to do, I get to the end of the day and as a result of various procrastination techniques have no time to get the essentials done. Of course, that description simplifies the possible outcomes but does give a broad overview of what happens. This ends up adding pressure which finally motivates me to get started and leaves me longing for more time that I would probably just end up wasting.

Even though the above example does not fit the traditional concept of resiliency, my mind keeps returning to it in response to the question because to me the idea of resiliency also holds the concept of thriving. One cannot, or at least I cannot, sustain a lifestyle of perpetual procrastination that helps me thrive.

So, in more words than I planned to write, I answer the question of my personal resiliency. We shall see what the future holds.