The intricacies of the human body never cease to amaze. I was reminded of this in a recent conversation with a young friend from work, Brandon, who needed some help brainstorming ideas for his college essay. I started by asking what he was interested in pursuing after high school—sports medicine, it turns out. Of course my incisive follow-up was something to the effect of: Ah, that’s intrissting! But why? He hesitated for a moment. Then I could see the light in Brandon’s eyes as he gathered the words to explain that the body is an endlessly fascinating matrix of processes, capable of healing and hurting, as powerful as it is fragile, as comprehensible as it is confounding. It’s a miraculous thing. A divine thing.

In exchange for helping brainstorm ideas for his college essay, Brandon helped me workshop a novel-in-progress. To my surprise, Brandon was extremely helpful—asking astute questions like “what is [blank’s] motivation for doing [x, y, and z]?” and making useful suggestions (so useful, in fact, I had to find a scrap of paper to write all of them down). Honestly, I think many editors could learn a thing or two from my sixteen year old friend, who asked all of the helpful (i.e. appropriately agitating) questions without being obnoxious or arrogant.

Without a doubt, Brandon’s a great kid with a bright future. And I’m not saying that because he helped me flesh out some ideas for a novel. Rather, I was impressed by the courage and vulnerability of his assertion that the human body is fascinating. It is.

After I asked him what interested him beyond the four, confining walls of the high school experience, I sensed his brief hesitation. Not because he didn’t know the answer, per se, but because he’d be opening himself up to judgment. What if I, an older male, were to tease him for his sincere interest in the body? What if I were to emasculate him for his earnestness?

Part of maturing is recognizing the ways in which we are all more fragile and vulnerable than we’d like to believe. Maturing means acknowledgment of the ways we are responsible to and for each other. Maturity is the understanding and humble acceptance that we are but one tiny piece in the puzzle of existence. And so, I hope, Brandon recognized that I wouldn’t judge him for his sincerity (as evidenced by his willingness to open up). Honestly, how could I? We’ve all suffered through the most terrifying and lonely days of a global pandemic. We’ve seen relatively healthy and happy people leveled by an illness we had little to no understanding of. We’ve endured protests and counter-protests, insurrection, and the gradual repeal of health and reproductive rights. Those of us still privileged to be here have endured through days in insolation, in fever, in waiting and paranoia, that have carved out of us a new collective conscience.

Over the years, I’ve come to know the ins and outs of my own body. I’ve learned (often the hard way) that my choices have consequences, and that, unfortunately, some difficult experiences can neither be anticipated nor avoided. And, thankfully, I’ve learned the grace of healing.

My journey to understand and cultivate healing practices began sincerely after my first semester of grad school. I’d crashed and burned several times before then, but it wasn’t until that first semester of grad school at Brown University that I knew what it felt like to really break with the normative syntax of reality.

The breakdown had been triggered by a combination of factors. Some of these were poor personal choices (self-medicating) and others had to do with the culture shock of having to adapt to the overwhelming whiteness of an Ivy League institution in New England. Having grown up in New York, actual diversity was the norm. Conservative and orthodox Jews living beside Pakistani Muslims living beside West Indian kinfolk living beside gente Latine. Brown, as an institution, has only a manufactured, paint-by-numbers (quota-determined) notion of diversity that did (does) little (nothing) to mitigate the consistent undercurrent of white privilege, wealth, class discrimination, etc. And I felt that. I felt student apprehension around me on campus. I saw how students of color and low-income students had to find each other and build solidarity (sometimes through trauma-bonding). I saw this culture expressed in some of Brown’s administrators and faculty.

While working for the University, one of the secretaries in the office (a white woman, perhaps in her late 30s) made an anonymous accusation of sexual harassment against me. The accusation wasn’t that I had sexually harassed the secretary (who anonymously lodged the complaint), but that I had sexually harassed another student worker in the office, a black girl, also from Brooklyn. When my supervisor summoned me to his office and dropped this bomb in my lap (of course careful to maintain the thinly veiled anonymity of all parties involved) it shook me to the core. I reached out to the only person it could’ve been (the only other person who worked in the office with me and this secretary) and asked (fairly confident that it wasn’t the case) if I had crossed any boundaries. The student-worker colleague had no clue what I was talking about or why I had even asked. And I understood then that it was just the insidious evil of another person hell-bent on exacting their vindictive power fantasy.

This is not to paint a picture of victimhood. I’m no saint. I’ve had my fair share of misogynistic, cruel, and hapless moments. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life confronting, understanding, and undoing (where possible) my complicity in forms of sexual violence. Worse still, I’ve spent days and hours regretting moments where I should have acted against misogyny or in defense of vulnerable women, but didn’t. As a friend at the university once said, “The worst mistake a man can make is assuming himself incapable of violence.” But this…was not that.

False accusations against black and brown folk happen all the time at historically white institutions and there’s little to no oversight. The implicit expectation of black and brown males in such spaces is that we are to keep our heads down, hands to ourselves (and visible), and gazes averted at all times or risk institutional violence. That is, unless, you’re an exceptional negro asset, which the institution might make an excuse or two for.

The odd irony is that my presence and participation in the systems and culture of an exclusive (and very wealthy) white American university led me to believe I was, in fact, unexceptional. In the immortal words of Spike Lee’s Buggin’ Out: “No, I’m just a [lightskint Latino] black man struggling to keep my d*ck hard in a cruel and harsh world.”

Growing up in Brooklyn, I had experienced all kinds of racism, but it had always been buffered by the fact that I had people and a community—I could escape from its evils in healthy and wholesome ways. At Brown I understood viscerally that there was a kind of white privilege still alive in America and capable of lynching, of character assassination and public shaming (and it wasn’t wrapped in a confederate flag—rather, in a Patriots jersey). And there was no place for me to retreat from it (or so I thought). This, in tandem with the arrogance of my poor (often egotistical) choices, led to an overwhelming sense of alienation and a dissociative breakdown.

In order to recover, I would have to start all-over, from scratch.

You are more resilient than you might realize...

If it’s not entirely painful for you, try to recall the last traumatic or difficult life-experience you endured. Maybe you’re still recovering. Or maybe you’re experiencing secondary trauma as the primary care-giver of another who is genuinely suffering. But the fact that you’re here, even that you’ve made it this far in the article, suggests you have endured and that, perhaps, you are resilient.

A question I’d often ask students in my courses on literature and healing is how they might describe the quality of resilience in a person. Dear reader, how would you define resilience? Take a moment to put resilience in your own words. There’s no wrong answer.

Common responses include the words rare and special to describe a quality we associate with strength, integrity, and adaptability in the face of adverse circumstances. Certainly we can say resilience is special. It’s a wonderful quality to have (like a high safety rating on a vehicle). But, like a high safety rating on a vehicle, you never want to be put in a position where you have to learn just how resilient you are. Life conspires against even the most cautious of its drivers. So resilience is definitely a special thing. But is it actually a rare thing? Is resilience among people uncommon?

The concept of resilience in psychology is often attributed to psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith after their watershed longitudinal study (i.e. repeated measurement of the same variables over time) in Kauai, Hawai’i. Often referred to simply as the “Kauai study”, Werner, Smith, and several confederates tracked the development of a cohort of all 698 children born on Kauai in 1955 for a whopping 32 years (and, for some of the original cohort, over 40 years). Werner published findings at various stages of the study and, by the early 90s, the concept of resilience had gained new legitimacy within social-psychological discourse and practice.

Of the 698 children observed in the study, 210 children “…were born and raised in poverty, had experienced pre- or perinatal complications; lived in families troubled by chronic discord, divorce, or parental psychopathology; and were reared by mothers with less than 8 grades of education.” Of these 210 children exposed to four or more of the aforementioned risk factors, two-thirds would develop learning and behavior problems. But, one-third of these high-risk children would demonstrate the opposite, defying the odds to lead normal if not, exceptionally successful adult lives. These Tupac-like roses that grew from concrete would provide the curious data for what we’d come to understand as psychological resilience. And if only 1 in 3 at-risk children demonstrated this special quality, then perhaps (in answer to our previous question), resilience is a rare quality.

The youth who made a successful adaptation in adulthood despite adversity relied on sources of support within their family and community that increased their competencies and self-efficacy, decreased the number of stressful life events they subsequently encountered, and opened up new opportunities for them.

Dr. Emmy Werner “Resilience and Recovery: Findings from the Kauai Longitudinal Study” (2005)

Being the first such study in a field yet to be determined (resilience studies) invariably meant these findings would come with more questions. What Werner’s study identified, beyond a shadow of a doubt, were three clusters of protective factors that significantly contributed to the positive outcomes of those children deemed resilient (or in the process of learning resilience). The first of these were protective factors within the individual, i.e. innate personality traits (like actually being cute) that made these children affable and ultimately allowed them to develop healthy self-esteem at an early age. Next were protective factors in the family, i.e. at least one quasi-familial guardian who cared unconditionally for the child and demonstrated a competent model of adulthood in the home. Finally were protective factors in the community, i.e. a beloved teacher or community center that could cater to the individual needs of the child-at-risk. The resilient children seemed to have at least one of these protective factors working in their favor. Other significant factors contributing to resilience in adulthood included religious affiliation/conversion (faith) and having an empathetic partner.

Each of these protective factors would allow the child (or adult) to recognize their own value and worth by providing them a safety net. That’s the beauty of the love we never realize we’ve been given. Our mistakes, all of our mistakes, have adverse consequences (a post-hoc paradox—we generally deem something a mistake after a deliberate choice yields undesirable returns). Most of us—most of us—are spared the worst of our mistakes in early and young-adult life because we were loved, because someone cared enough to educate us without shaming us, cared enough to console us when we felt heartbroken and confused, cared enough to remind us we are still good (or kinda good) and life is still worth living.

I stress most of us because more recent studies suggest resilience is actually rather common, despite the initial finding that one in three at-risk children seem to have this quality.

It defies every economic principle. That a thing, in this case resilience, can be both special (valuable) and common (in high-supply). Werner and Smith’s study offered the world a beautiful new understanding of resilience as a quality and process we might measure and objectively understand. But it would be ethically unsound to base our understanding of resilience (if it is to be categorized uniquely) by one mid-century study—a study that had free access to a colonized community and used as markers of positive outcomes conventional notions of American success (employment, educational and vocational success, marriage). The Kauai study’s use of the term risk or high-risk, for example, has its origins in 19th century British maritime insurance—a peculiar institution to say the least.

Findings in Dr. Ann Masten’s 2001 “Ordinary Magic: Resilience processes in development” established resilience as common among children, i.e. ordinary magic. And Dr. George Bonanno’s 2004 article “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?” went a bit further than both Werner and Masten’s findings by suggesting that:

1. Resilience is Different from Recovery 
2. Resilience is Common 
3. There Are Multiple and Sometimes Unexpected Pathways to Resilience

Meaning what? Bonanno distinguishes resilience and recovery as unique trajectories in response/reaction to trauma, the former resembling level-headedness and the latter resembling someone who’s been derailed from normalcy and must work toward…recovery.

By allowing for this distinction, Bonanno’s data reveals that resilience is a quality most adults share. Most adults capably deal with loss, death, grief, etc. Resilient individuals are able to grieve the death of a loved one, for example, by sitting shiva for seven days and returning to quotidian life after the grieving period. Resilient individuals may be financially prepared for the death of a loved one by having contingencies in place, i.e. life insurance, will, executor, funeral arrangements.

Indeed, there are any number of paths an individual might take advantage of or rely on to keep on calm water, despite the bad weather (and without having a delayed response or an even rarer chronic condition). Bonanno specifically cites hardiness, self-enhancement, repressive coping, and positive emotion and laughter as some unique protective factors in resilience. Odds are you know someone like this. Someone who still manages to laugh while everyone is crying. Someone who carries an extra packet of tissues and cough drops and peppermints (just in case). Someone who makes sure they look put-together even if they’re just going to the grocery store (for tissues, cough drops and peppermints). Maybe even someone who’d rather not talk about it and makes no show of their grief.

What I love about Bonanno’s study is that he offers a bit more nuance to what Werner originally determined as resilience. Ironically, what I most hated about Bonanno’s study was that it made me realize I wasn’t among the many psychologically adaptable adults the study would deem resilient (or on a resilience trajectory). When I first encountered Bonanno in the spring of 2012, I was rather (already) on the downslope of my own recovery period.

I wasn’t resilient. I was recovering.

The night of my breakdown, the world and all its words had become scrambled. I couldn’t remember the names of basic things. I couldn’t quite figure out where I was or what I was doing. I was afraid and confused, slipping into a dissociative fugue as everything I laid eyes on withdrew from understanding, sucked into a dark vortex that spiraled above and threatened to consume me.

I remember rushing out of my spartan apartment, searching the orange lamp-lit streets of Fox Point for someone who might help. Then a rush of relief as, in the distance, the silhouette of a campus security guard materialized. I knew at least that this would be someone authorized to help a student in need.

I’m not sure what I must’ve looked like to him. Maybe the madness was visible. Maybe I hid it well enough not to cause a scene. But I remember him towering over me in the dark. I’m sorry to bother you officer, because I’m always wont to apologize for my presence when approaching armed and deputized white males. I’m feeling kind of confused and afraid and I need help. I remember him responding, terse and to the point, neither friendly nor aggrieved, but with the flat affect of one simply doing their duty. I can’t help you. But I can call someone who’ll help you. I backed away slowly. I realized then I had been looking for a person, a human touch, reassurance. Not, as I had assumed by his tone and demeanor, the kind of help he would’ve sought on my behalf. No, I said. Thank you anyway. I’ll be fine. I bolted back to my apartment and tried to hide from a world of words and ideas peeling away from the walls around me.

In retrospect, it’s possible that night I avoided hospitalization or even institutionalization (though, in some ironic post-mortem metacommentary, this experience was already the result of my academic institutionalization). The indifference in his voice, the sort I remember hearing at various horrible moments in childhood and young adulthood, was pitiless and evocative of padded white walls, sedation, arrest. Whatever help I needed, I realized, couldn’t have come from a person like that. It had to come from holistic sources, from people genuinely invested in my well-being (not…duh…a white cop—who honestly might’ve meant the best for me. It just wasn’t a risk I was willing to take that night).

A few people—who really did and do love me—saved my life in the winter of 2011. One was my friend John Murillo III.

John, soft-spoken and handsome, has one foot firmly in this world and the other in realms of time and space heretofore uncharted. After a decade, I know him well. But when we first met I thought he was a bit stiff. And I suspect he was a bit suspicious of me too (as one should be). Fortunately, over time, we warmed to each other and realized how much we have in common—our love of literature, animation, science and…gaming. John reminded me of the things I had grown up loving, but had abandoned for one reason or another. And having the opportunity to share in his passions (which were also my forgotten passions) helped me remember missing parts of myself. To this day, John is a part of my heart. Wherever rests John’s heart, rests my heart and my home.

There was also Ms. Nicole Milner, with her gorgeous blue eyes and Banana Slug, San Diego pride. She and I experienced a spiritual awakening together. By that point in my life, I had drifted so far from my roots in Christianity that I no longer remembered what it meant to pray earnestly, to believe, to have faith in the altruistic machinations of something, someone, far greater than any human effort. Nicole had encouraged me to go to a church on Westminster St. near Olneyville with her on Sundays and together we found prayer again, faith again. To this day, we share thoughts on Bible verses and find time to joke about the more confounding elements of the good book.

My relationship to language too had changed. I had trouble writing, reading, speaking. Fortunately I was studying with the illustrious poet Michael S. Harper, who’d pushed me to dive into poetry and history with a seriousness no teacher before had matched. In his later years, MSH was not particularly cognizant of time. He could go on and on for hours, sometimes to his actual detriment. I remember sitting through his office hours, watching as he’d meet with one after the other student. On one occasion I had to remind him to have lunch (which I was more than happy to fetch for him). In any case, to this day I cherish our very frank discussions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (he spared no detail and, like certain of his Jazz idols, could really turn a blue phrase). In one of our last chats before the end of the semester, I’d let him know things had not gone so well for me that semester. In response, he urged me to consider taking a course taught by his friend and fellow Jazz aficionado, Dr. Ferdinand Jones. The course was called Human Resilience. And wouldn’t you know it…I took that class the following year. Learned quite a few things from Dr. Jones (if you hadn’t noticed). But that was also Dr. Jones—a clinical psychologist who’d grown up in NYC, loved Jazz, and saved more than a few lives.

Finally, of course, there was my mother, Mrs. Nancy Sanchez-Taylor. The source of my faith, my joy, my warmth. She’s always been my anchor. The full story of our mother-son relationship deserves more than a simple paragraph here and I’m neither physically nor emotionally prepared to deliver on that right now. Suffice it to say, mom always made room for me at home (should I need a landing pad). And that winter, when I returned home heart-broken and dazed, ready to crash on that dog-hair covered couch, it was no different. Except, that Christmas, my mother surprised me with a Playstation 3 and three games. One was Dishonored. The other, Batman: Arkham City. And the third was Assassin’s Creed III (which we can, for now, disregard because it’s ass). That PS3 did so much for me on the way to recovery. It allowed me to tune out some of the dismaying parts of the world and refocus on my internal clock. Having in-game, diegetic objectives allowed me to feel productive and creative, while also safe within the escapist bounds of the digital playground. Some years later (when my sister hit her own rough patch) I remembered what that gift from mom meant to me and decided to surprise my sister with a Nintendo Switch. I think it provided her a similar comfort.

Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to make this so personal, at all. But I realize, it wasn’t just things or practices that helped me recover—but the genuine love of people who cared to see me survive and thrive.

It was because of these people that I’d return to Brown with a renewed sense of self. After having crashed so hard, after having been humbled, I wanted nothing more than to repair what had been broken (and to really help others too).

That’s the thing about wounds. You are, in ways both superficial and deeply realized, coded forever by the trauma you’ve endured. When you’ve been bruised or experience a break, a healthy body makes every attempt to suture and heal itself. With the assistance of a healthcare professional or medical supplement or a plain ol’ loving touch, your body can and will find its way back to equilibrium. But that process of healing in human tissue, called fibrosis, does not heal you back to 100% integrity. The tissue is never as it once was. The wound will always be a little bit tender, a little bit prone to tear or break the way it once had.

When I went back to Brown, I made one choice: that was to slow down. I invested in creature comforts for my otherwise uncomfortable apartment. I gave up smoking. I learned breathing exercises, which I practiced every day while listening to Ella Fitzgerald or watching animated Japanese folk tales on a pirate site. I went back to swimming and fitness and self-care and focused on the joy of living life one day at a time.

It’s never easy, healing. Perhaps the one thing any healing process shares, regardless of circumstance or outcomes, is how viscerally uncomfortable it is. When a scab develops over a healing wound (your body’s form of a band-aid), you’ll notice it occasionally itching. As collagen cells develop and keratinization grows skin over the wound, once dead or traumatized nerves begin to signal their sensitivity again—hence the tingling and itching. The inclination, of course, is to scratch. But it’s best to leave it alone. Let the process unfold on its own. This is, in essence, what’s so difficult about healing. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it really hurts in a way that defies basic logic. If I’m supposed to be getting better, why is this so painful and difficult?

It’s because you’re re-learning, re-adjusting. And like any process, it’s hard to point to any single moment as an absolute turning point. You’re always a bit wet and drying, always at risk of regression, at risk of falling off the wagon, of tearing your ACL again in the 4th.

I, for example, would go back to smoking after quitting (more than a few times). The year after my breakdown, during a regular checkup with the dentist (Dr. Payne), I was informed that there were two tumors on/in my tongue and that they’d have to be removed for biopsy. I was awake for the whole bloody procedure and would have to live with stitches in my bloody, wounded tongue for many months (soaking excess blood in my sleep with herbal tea bags). Fortunately the tumors were benign.

All of this to remind you that, wherever you are right now, know that you are absolutely capable of finding equilibrium again (presuming that is your heart’s desire). And yes, we are forever marked by the traumata we suffer—but this ultimately has no bearing on our capacity to enjoy life’s pleasures (if we’re open to the multiplicity of joys available to us at any given moment). If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that, while we cannot protect ourselves from life’s tragedies, we can be proactive agents in guarding our hearts.

The heart physically and symbolically mediates information from the brain and the gut. It is our central processing unit. All things considered, a heart at peace (which is to say, in rhythm) is a heart resolved. It’s perhaps the worst cliché of all time, but it’s true. Your heart is worth listening to. Because you’ll learn that what makes a person resilient is the recognition of one’s tender places, one’s unique disquiet. The resilient among us are not so alarmed by the strange silence, or even the maddening arrhythmia. The resilient among us are not so worried about getting lost or losing. The resilient among us trust that they can find their way back. And I promise you, however far and away you may have been led astray, you can always find your way back.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
        love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.