Personal Resilience: The Cult of the Rubber Ball

May 2025 

They tell us we are meant to bounce.

It is said with the same confidence that accompanies other polite lies: that everything happens for a reason, that time heals, that character is what you show when no one is watching. Resilience, the modern catechism goes, is a matter of elasticity. You are struck—by death, disappointment, failure—and, like the child’s rubber toy, you rebound. Same shape. Same shine. Same innocence.

Only it isn’t true.

People do not bounce. They absorb. They warp. Sometimes, if they are fortunate, they emerge not as they were, but as something else—less familiar, less pure, perhaps, but more enduring. Pain does not pass through us like a gust of wind. It settles. It rearranges the furniture. And whatever returns is never what was.

The fantasy persists, of course. It suits us. Politicians invoke it; therapists recycle it; motivational speakers pin it to slides. But under the lacquer is a harder truth: that resilience is not given. It is earned, and often at great cost.

There is a difference between surviving and appearing to survive. Between the child who leaps for the thrill of falling and the one who glances back to check the net is still there. We confuse courage with confidence, and confidence with insulation. Some risks are taken only because the fall is cushioned in advance.

This, too, is resilience: the kind imagined by those who have yet to be tested. The quiet belief that should ruin arrive, they will endure. They have not yet been broken—but they trust they will bounce. It is not resilience at all. It is presumption.

Lincoln, awkward and pock-marked, did not bounce. He failed—in commerce, in courtship, in speech. He was not destined for greatness; he earned it by dragging himself through disgrace, by making peace with loneliness. His resilience had nothing of the rubber ball. It was not a return to form—it was a transfiguration.

But this is not what sells. The market prefers resilience that can be branded. Workshops. Acronyms. The illusion of grit at twenty pounds a session. Austerity in yoga pants. We want wisdom without wounds. We want therapy without truth.

The literature offers us five traits—optimism, regulation, accountability, adaptability, problem-solving. It is neat. Painless. Apolitical. But resilience, when it matters, is seldom photogenic. It is not pretty. It does not speak in hashtags.

What it does—what it can do—is remind us that the world is not here to cradle us. That our task is not to bounce back, but to walk forward, unevenly, with the broken bits rattling inside. That the good life is not about recovery but reckoning. Not evasion, but endurance.

And if we are lucky, it leaves us not healed—but changed. And still, somehow, upright.