People often view resilience as a badge of honour, a sign of strength in the face of adversity. However, for Natasha Sholl and many others, resilience feels far more complicated. Sholl has endured immense loss and hardship: she lost her boyfriend suddenly while they were sleeping, her brother passed away unexpectedly nine years later, and her son received a devastating diagnosis of cancer and Guillain-Barre Syndrome. These experiences have shaped her understanding of resilience, not as an inspiring triumph over adversity, but as a difficult, often exhausting process of survival.
Sholl critiques the way society presents resilience, especially its tendency to glorify it. We often expect those who have suffered trauma to “bounce back” and serve as examples of strength and perseverance. But this version of resilience ignores the messiness and emotional toll that comes with simply getting through the day. Sholl explains that she refuses to let others use her trauma to make themselves feel better about their own lives or struggles.
Her perspective on resilience is different from the common narrative. It’s not about always overcoming adversity with a smile—it’s about existing through pain, sometimes quietly, sometimes painfully, and often without the burden of having to inspire others. For Sholl, resilience is fluid. It’s not a constant state of strength, and it doesn’t look the same every day. Sometimes, it’s as simple as getting out of bed. Other times, it’s just surviving without the pressure to prove anything to the outside world.
Sholl raises the issue of how society has co-opted resilience. It shifts the responsibility of recovery onto the individual, asking them to carry the burden of being “okay” while not acknowledging the cost of that endurance. There’s an unspoken expectation that those who have suffered must come out stronger, offering hope or inspiration to others. But resilience doesn’t need to be performative. It doesn’t have to look strong to be valid.
Sholl challenges the binary thinking around resilience, where people are either resilient or not. Instead, she argues that resilience is a continuum. Some days, it may look like someone has “bounced back,” but on others, it might be a quiet endurance, a decision to keep going even when the weight of grief or hardship feels too heavy. There’s no right or wrong way to experience resilience, and society’s expectations often do more harm than good by trying to define what it should look like.
Ultimately, Sholl’s message is one of compassion—for those who endure and for the way we understand resilience. Rather than holding people to an impossible standard of strength, we need to embrace the idea that survival, in all its forms, is enough.
Source: This article is based on information obtained from The Guardian
Image: Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash
