The word 'resilience' is a passive aggressive weapon that makes me want to scream

Who's with me?

“Darling – you just have to learn to be more resilient!”

She fixes a smile of expensive dentistry, before popping a morsel of braised beef into her mouth. As she chews she looks around to see if there’s anyone important nearby, gazing out across a dark sea of monotonous suits capped with waves of grey and balding heads. Her artfully dishevelled pixie cut with choppy highlights stand out as much as her sleek Valentino outfit. It looks like an an exotic songbird has lost its way and ended up in Trafalgar Square with the one-legged pigeons.

This woman has achieved something extraordinary to be here – she is someone to listen to. She is someone I need to listen to.

In contrast, I have never felt worse about myself. It looks certain that I’m facing redundancy at work – something that triggers a deep-rooted fear and panic in me after I lost my dream job aged twenty-seven. I was young and naïve and didn’t know that this was a thing that could happen – and it hit me hard. It took three years to recover from the shock and misery of it – and contributed in a small way to the death of my marriage. “I feel like your carer” spat my husband as we were in throws of agreeing to end things.

To help cheer me up, my new boyfriend’s mother – a career powerhouse – has invited me for lunch at the House of Lords, where she sits as a Life Peer. The dining room is large and elaborate, yet somehow still smacks of school dinners. I suspect that’s how its inhabitants like it, reminding them of their days at Eton. It never ceases to amaze me how much old-school institutions mimic privileged boyhood comforts. I’d much rather be at home cheering myself with a curry.

“Really darling”, she expands, warming to her theme “You just need to not let these things get to you!”.

I nod dumbly and shiver. The large room is cold, and my cashmere DVF wrap dress is only knee length. There’s a large blister forming on the back of my heel thanks to my stilettos, hastily shoved on while sitting on a litter-covered bench in Westminster tube station. The contrast to where I am now is laughable.

Since that day, several years ago now, the word resilience has been thrown at me a number of times – and never in a good context. For example, the time I was being asked to do five people’s jobs at work – and when I admitted to finding it hard was told to be “more resilient”. When I was bullied by a boss and tried to speak to a mentor about it, the advice was the same; be “more resilient”.

Resilience has become a weapon – a buzzword used by companies and bullies to justify that what they are asking of you is correct. You’re the problem – it’s you. You’re just not quite good enough to handle what you should be able to. But don’t worry – we will train you to be more resilient. To take on more. To not complain. Resilience training has become big business, with many companies offering it to leadership teams. To me this is fucked up brainwashing.

There are, of course, exceptions. Military training is notoriously tough, with elite schemes for the most hardy of individuals – like the Royal Marines – pushing souls to breaking point to find who has the spirit to endure. But there’s a good reason for this. These people are trained fighters, who will in all likelihood face some horrendous and genuinely life-threatening situations. If my job entailed the possibility of being kidnapped and tortured, I’d sure as hell like some training ahead of time on this. Plus these drills are designed to find the right soldiers for the job – most are expected to fail. Nobody has an issue with that – because hardcore resilience is not for everyone. It doesn’t mean you’re of no use – you’re just better at something else.

Karen from accounts, over-worked and with three children, does not need this training. She probably just needs to be given a break from time to time, and a little empathy from those around her. Maybe have someone make her a cup of tea and help her manage her workload.

But my major problem with the word resilience – aside from it consigning anyone who’s not ruthless and hard as nails to the job rubbish bin – is that it’s used incorrectly.

Resilience is our ability to come back after things go wrong. It’s about elasticity – the ability to spring back into shape after being bent in a different way. It is not about rigidity – of refusing to be bent in the first place. It’s not refusing to have a reaction. It’s not about showing no emotion, not getting upset, or feeling down. And yet this how it is weaponised against us. Feel upset because your job is threatened? Just be more resilient! Feel over-worked and broken? Just be resilient!

Resilience is having your heart broken and finding strength to go on a date again. Resilience is weathering a personal tragedy and one day laughing again. It’s losing a race and trying again next year. It’s accepting what’s happened, licking your wounds and emerging in the hope of a better outcome. But it needs a bit of time in the cave before you come out fighting again.

I was reminded of the conversation on that cold day in the House of Lords last week. I’m in a tough spot with finding work at present, and was freaking out about my lack of income. Then beating myself up for not being more ‘resilient’.

But, taking a breath, I started to think about other things I’d been through that were hard. How I’d faced them and cried and sometimes fallen apart – but always found a way to carry on. And that not to be terrified when facing rising living costs while having not income would just be fucking weird.

So I let myself freak out – knowing it was part of the process that would bring me out and towards a solution. I am resilient. We all are – we’ve all faced thing in our lives we’d rather not, and we’re all still here.

Resilience sometimes looks like falling apart. And that’s ok – it’s all part of the process. If companies could support this instead of preaching unquestioning endurance and trying to pass it off as something else, things might just work a bit better.