My #OneWord2021 is RESILIENCE.
2020 was an extremely difficult year, and the change on the calendar doesn’t really change the world around us (other than me forgetting that it’s a new year and using 2020 on all the things I write instead of 2021). That being said, if there’s one lesson I took from 2020 it’s that more than ever resilience is key. I find that reflecting on the last year (but not fixating on it) can be a useful task because it allows you to look at who you were, who you are, and who you want to be. While you can do this at anytime, the beginning of a year is a pretty easy marker to use.
In the first couple weeks of 2021 alone, I’ve had many ups and downs. Between awful events in the world, the continuing pandemic, and struggling with personal motivation, many times I have already felt like giving up. There’s definitely a bit of imposter syndrome mixed in there, and recognizing that helps in the short term (although this problem always persists). Resilience is not something I’ve always been known for but I do think it’s something that can be worked on and I know that being more resilient in the future will be extremely helpful.
At this point I’d like to note what I actually mean by resilience. The Oxford definition of resilience is:
the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness
which in and of itself sounds pretty good, however there are a couple extensions here that I think are important. We have a lot of ideas of what “toughness” is, and what it means to recover quickly from problems, and often these ideas are unhealthy. When I speak about being resilient, I’d like to stress that the recovering aspect is not just a dust-under-the-carpet thing, but rather a reflection on the difficulties that allows you to both take on and grow from them. For me, to be resilient is to tackle life’s challenges head-on and find creative solutions that don’t just skirt around the issue.
