There is a word that we use and celebrate so often that we hardly ever stop to question it.
Resilience.
Think about it! We tell our children to be resilient. We praise resilient leaders who go the extra mile. We admire resilient communities. We celebrate people who keep showing up in spite of the fact that life has knocked them down. My tribe and I use the phrase “life be lifin’.”
As a parent, I really hope that my daughter grows to be resilient. I want her to know that difficult moments and circumstances don’t have the final say. I want her to know that she can do hard things.
But I also want her to be aware of the costs of resilience.
No one becomes resilient on purpose. We do it because we had to endure something that we truly wish never happened. We become resilient because we were forced to adapt, survive, push through, keep going.
Resilience is just evidence that someone survived.
As much as we talk about resilience, we hardly ever talk about what it really is. The real tension shows up when we acknowledge that evidence of survival is not the same as evidence of healing. I think our culture has gotten the two confused at times.
We applaud the person who “never gives up.” We admire the teacher who gives everything to students while quietly burning out. We celebrate organizations that continue to serve communities despite impossible circumstances. We praise parents who keep showing up, even when exhausted.
And yes, all of that deserves recognition. But at some point we have got to ask:
When do they get to heal?
Because surviving trauma is not the same thing as recovering from it.
We still carry wounds from every situation that we had to be resilient through. Something gets left behind.
Grief. Fear. Hypervigilance. Distrust. Fatigue.
All of these things served us when we were just trying to survive. But what happens when these same things keep us from fully living?
Resilience carries us through the fire.
Healing helps us put down the smoke.
This is why I think another word deserves more attention:
Joy.
Not happiness. Joy.
Joy does not mean that we pretend everything is okay. We are not talking about doing that whole “toxic positivity” thing. This also isn’t sticking our heads in the sand, ignoring injustice, or denying pain.
Joy is remembering that trauma and oppression don’t get to decide or define our humanity!
Domination systems do more than control our resources. They have to control our imagination. They teach us to expect suffering, to normalize exhaustion, and to accept that our ultimate goal should simply be to endure.
Joy doesn’t operate that way.
Joy reminds us that we are more than what happened to us. Joy refuses to let pain become the totality of who we are.
Joy says that even while we are fighting for justice, we are allowed to laugh. We are allowed to create. We are allowed to celebrate one another. We require rest. We are allowed to imagine a world that looks different from our past.
Joy is an act of rebellion.
This is not about ignoring oppression, but about refusing to surrender to it!
Resilience may be the first chapter, but joy is where we discover that the story was never just about surviving.
It was always about living.