the author's field-guide to resilience
a confession addressed to everyone who feels continually incomplete, and anyone who has ever felt broken beyond repair.
Current state, catalogue of self: moments marked by struggle and etched in impatient colors. These days, it’s all the same mantra: I will continue to try my best. I will continue to survive.
These days, I leak pain through my pores like open wounds.
I tell myself it has to come out somewhere, learnt through the heart and expelled through material flesh. I bleed colors too pale for the naked eye to see.
Nonetheless, I feel ever the more empty. The in-between moments feel like miniature eternities, microcosmic forevers. They expand inside me with promised ache, despite my best attempts at resilience. Yet, I have a penchance for reckless optimism, fueled by the hope that in time, I will find myself on the other side of all of this. Heart willing, I will survive all of this. Spirit willing, I will make it through.
I can survive all of this. All of this pain, this jagged and bleeding present. I can survive all of this, this wounded self I occupy, this exhausted body I inhabit, this unforgiving and exhausting world in which I exist. This world in which I am allowed to exist yet not inhabit. I will survive it.
I am filtered through the glass, fragmented and abstracted light beam. Shattered, splintered. I ache through every moment. I ache in this moment. All of these moments, collecting like raindrops, bearing down under impossible weight. I am trying not to crack under the pressure.
I will live in spite of myself, and survive in spite of everything else.
**
I am waiting on the platform for a train that never comes. Even when I can hear it creeping close, coming in the distance, tried tracks squealing metal screams, the sound fades again, no more than a memory. No more than a prayer, perhaps. Perhaps it never existed at all, and I was so hopeful that my imagination conceived it. Imagination to placate the tired soul.
Every night, I dream of approaching trains.
Sometimes, earnest hope betrays. I am trying to keep faith that hope will come through, eventually. Hope carried on angels’ wings.
Even today, the clock counts down, minutes, neon promised arrival. It gets closer and closer, but the train never comes. The morning never dawns. I am in stasis. I am stagnant. I am still. Frozen in time. Trapped in the gaps. Known only to myself and the in-betweens.
Lately, I am needle-pricked and broken bare. Stripped raw and exposed. I ache and pray to be known, rather than simply memorized. Half the people that try make little more than half-hearted attempts — the others, nothing at all.
I ache to be seen in entirety, to be known, rather than committed to memory in fragments. I am a person, but I am making myself a prayer. I am existing in partial selves. I resign myself to half-felt truths and half-lived lives. Always searching for the catharsis in the in-betweens; a semblance of peace wherever I can find a moment to breathe. It is a desperate stab towards life. Base Instinct. Raw desire.
I am breathing in screams, bearing wounds that feel everlasting in their permanence. Every day, another needle, new stitch. Wounds opened over barely-scars. Scabbed and wearing past worn. I am so often threadbare.
Yet, I am desperate to survive, even if on raw human instinct alone. I’ve made survival a habit, a practice to continually embody. Survival as my singular religion.
I’ll admit, it becomes harder and harder to have faith – in survival, in myself. My own strength wavers.
On my weakest days, I let muscle memory carry me through. My body has always known how to survive better than my mind, so I let my cells do the work. Even stretched thin and torn through, my heart never ceases, my lungs continue to expand and contract, cycling breaths. My body persists even when I cannot.
I am reserving pain for the moments in-between, offering myself little time to feel for fear of imminent collapse. There is no space for the screams to release, no expanse of woods wide enough, no pit deep enough to bear them, so I swallow them. I transform poison into essential nutrients. I teach my lungs to breathe sour air.
The human body can survive past hope; I persist on life alone. Human nature, human habit. Survival, a habit best learned with constant practice. I have survived worse, and I will survive through worse.
Yet, the little voice always begins to doubt (and this is its’ fundamental job, to echo fear and reverberate throughout me)—is this all there ever is?
My father tells me I will never reach the finish line. He promises me that this is all there ever is — all that there ever will be. Why should I try, if I will always live half-truths and inhabit in-betweens? He’s convinced my fractures will always show. He’s convinced I will never be truly whole as I so desire. He tells me that I will always be two-way glass. Everyone will see into me, but I will see nothing outside myself, occupying a room alone with my aches and my pains.
Seen through yet never looking out.
The little voice inside me often believes him (this, too, is its’ job, to absorb cruel words and repeat them in perpetuity.) If the future is already planned and painted out, then what is the point of switching mediums?
He wants me to give up, but he doesn’t know it. The Instinct. He can’t feel it, etched into my bones, the very fibers of my being entire, known by every cell, little vessels hellbent on survival. My body works so hard to survive — it heals where I cannot begin to. My body knows the path when my heart gets lost. It leads me home even with closed eyes. Even in total darkness.
My body persists in spite of me, so I will live in spite of myself, and survive in spite of everything else.
**
The world is a door still closed to me. I leave claw marks against the wood but I never manage to make it through. I do not even make a dent. In this not-yet-world, I cannot begin to exist - condemned to occupy a universe that isn’t entirely my own.
In my not-world, I settle for record-keeping. I am a recordist of my own pain.
I am an author of a field-guide to survival in the impossible age.
I am still trying to turn the desperation for survival into resilience. Yet, most days I am only recording pain, cataloguing moments with the dedication of a devoted librarian. Tracing scars in scrap paper — record-keeping for a wholer body. Record-keeping for when the present eventually becomes the past.
I am leaving notes for myself. Once, this was all I was. But can’t you see, now, that we made it?
My best-held hopes are that this will all be in the past someday. I am all stitches and staples now, but one day I will inhabit a skin that fits. Our skin will be our own. Our body fully occupied. No more hiding. No more half-truths. Our world: ours entire.
Today, I am forcing the emptiness to be enough, committing the pits in my stomach and pockmarks in my heart to memory in the meantime. One day, my cells remind me, this will be no more than a story to tell.
It’s half instinct and half desperation. The self that succumbs is a self that sinks, committing instead to corpsehood, digging graves in broad daylight. I hold myself up. My body has impossible weight, but still, I carry myself. I bear the burden. I will make the impossible bearable, somehow.
I remind myself: you won’t know how to do it until the doing gets done.
Those who have walked this path before me have managed, and they have managed worse. My half-lives have been quarter-lives for others. Partial existences - contained, no escape in sight. No world to occupy. Others never managed to breach the surface, pretend-living whilst drowning inside themselves.
I will breach the surface. I will break free.
So I continue stitching myself together. Again and again. I weave myself into a tapestry with borrowed yarn. The world will wear holes in me, but I will keep stitching. I will manage. I will persist within my impossibilities.
Life cannot simply just be holding on. I tell myself - half prayer, half promise - this cannot be all there is.
Life is not a waiting room.
Every morning, I wake up overgrown. I begin new dawns by peeling off the extraneous layers, cutting off the excess. I hack and twist my body into a body capable of survival, a self capable of making it through. I shape myself and I force myself through existence. I will make it through.
I will make it through: this is an order. This is a prayer. This is threadbare, worn-down life, stripped raw to the fibers of human desperation alone. And I will survive in spite of it all. I will live past the impossible.
I will live in spite of myself, and survive in spite of everything else.
**
I am always learning how to wear pain like a second skin. I am a relentless optimist, digging my fingers into hope until it breaks free, offers solace.
I claw forward for a self I picture that one day will exist. I still doubt, not so sure that self will ever come to be. Perhaps it’s only hope. Perhaps I’m only fortune-telling. Perhaps I’m only praying. I suppose I can never know, so I hold onto hope. Today, I hope that it is more than desperation. Tomorrow, I will hope the same.
Nonetheless, I find present joy in half-lived lives. I breathe screams and bend them into a shape that resembles hope, and I depend on self-contained creation in the meantime.
I imagine Christ started with the in-betweens and went from there.
When I cannot create myself, I will create other things. I will paint myself on the pages. If I am bleeding, then I will use the blood as ink. I will write poems on flayed skin. I will carve the mantras into my bones. I will persist. I will survive. I will make it through.
I will etch beautiful things into existence, bandage my sores, and lick my wounds.
If this world cannot be wholly mine, then I will decorate the spaces I am permitted to inhabit. I will make the darkest and dankest rooms into palaces and gallery spaces. Wherever I am allowed, I will make it beautiful. It’s the only thing I know how to do. Maybe it’s the only thing left.
My world is small, and my body is bruised and broken. Nonetheless, I will make it vibrant in spirit and nature. I let my pain water vibrant gardens of my own creation. I will paint my in-betweens in bright shades rather than gray hues. Fuchsia, crimson, violet. I rely on the simple and minute beauty that I am allowed.
Perhaps, putting a floral Bandaid on the deepest wound is enough to begin to repair. I will infuse beauty into all the ugly things. I stitch myself together with sheer determination and raw fibers of creation alone. I will make my world beautiful, even if that’s all I can do.
Perhaps that’s all that resilience is — learning to manage with what’s left behind.
I continue to persist and continue to create.
I paint the world in bruised and bloody colors. I transform bodily pain into worldly beauty.
An abridged definition of the entirety of human determination: to do everything you can to survive and to paint the world radiant with whatever’s left behind.
Even if it’s simply skin and bone.
kc love you are incredible, this is beautiful