#310 – What in you opposes your resilience?

According to the American Psychological Association's website,

"Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands."

It can be learned and practiced, the site says, and many external and internal factors contribute to it.

But no matter our resourceful to find peace, the Ghost of Misplaced Guilt (GoMG) has one job: to trip us up.

On Mother's Day, I made a pie. I knew my son would love it, even if he wasn't home to enjoy it.

My making it was an intentional act of resistance. I wanted to protest the system that keeps a 20-year old with no criminal record in jail for 209 days awaiting trial. My luscious pie was my way to stand up to the system, to tell it, you won't break me.

But then, when my son was on the phone wishing me a happy Mother's Day, my strength wavered.

I could make a pie. Or go to brunch and drink (non-alcoholic) mimosas to my heart's content. Or work my retail job––or quit it, as I actually did.

But he couldn't. He couldn't choose any of his activities that day––or any other day. Not even to trim his toe nails––or when or where to do it.

Because I'm free––and he's not.

My GoMG didn't find this fair, so it popped up in my mind, all dressed in black like a Spanish widow, shaking its head and a "how can you be so cruel/selfish/unempathetic" expression in its face.

Its goal? That I suspend all happiness and enjoyment because someone I love "has it worse" than me.

To ensure that, the Ghost will do whatever it can to keep my spirits under the metaphorical weather. It'll flash memories of my son's former happiness, as a toddler, a young boy, a teenager. Contrasting them with grotesque images of his current status, dressed in orange, his hair too long and disheveled, his slouched back because the chairs in the jail are just jail chairs, and no exercise is allowed.

But my son's resilience is more bottomless than brunch mimosas, and he reminded me that his time in jail won't be any easier just because I, outside, suffer.

And if I'm going to see the end of this marathon, I might as well preserve my peace and happiness––as will he.

When have you stood up to your Ghosts to preserve your happiness in the face of adversity?

Love,

Carolina