Joraaver Chahal

Resilience and Uncertainty

A week ago, a friend reached out to me about an injury he suffered. After an extensive discussion about the injury and my personal experience with it, he remarked upon my resilience. I gave a sheepish thank you. The topic of resilience has weighed on me since then. I currently have my own issues with my knee and my condition is forcing me to make difficult decisions about my future in athletic endeavors. It affects my mood from time to time, but I do not let it become a personality trait. The timing of these thoughts compelled me to write. Even when I am finished writing, it likely won’t be enough.

I have never seen myself as resilient. While I do not consider my injuries trivial, in the grand scheme of things, they only affect my physical health. I’m not being facetious. Individuals who suffer from physical trauma often suffer emotional and mental trauma too. But with physical trauma, the body does its very best to return to “normal,” whatever that may look like. It is already healing from the moment injury occurs. Sufferers of acute physical trauma are, by that fact, the most blessed, for they only need a little supervision and time to heal their wounds. In my eyes, the misfortunate souls who experience abuse, severe emotional pain, or acute bouts of mental stress are tortured every day, for they suffer wounds that time will not heal. They have to suffer actively to heal their wounds. I do not know what that is like, and can only imagine how lucky I am to not be them.

My problem is that I believe if I were truly resilient, I would not be writing about resilience, because it would not weigh on my mind. Because each injury is only physical, not emotional. Because I don’t “stay hard” the way David Goggins would want me to (disclaimer: I haven’t read his book Can’t Hurt Me). And perhaps, most of all, because of what I said above. That the truly resilient probably fight every day to be what feels “normal.” While I, with a little patience and proper expectation setting, am about as normal as they come.

What then can I offer on this topic? Why write?

I think there’s an underlying thread that is often missed when discussing what it takes to be resilient.

Every person who hones a craft only to suddenly lose his ability to do it, faces a future of unknowns. An athlete with a career-ending injury. A musician losing her ability to hear. Or, perhaps an all too common example, a soldier coming home to nothing but peace. There are too many Reddit posts, too many psychology articles, and too many forum threads for me to write about this subject, nor do I feel equipped to. After all, none of my previous injuries were career-ending (not that I had a career in anything athletics) but it has come to a point where I too face a future of unknowns. That and I’m aware of the statistics about physical injury and its effect on declining physical and mental health, on social circles, and on self-confidence.

If everything in life was guaranteed, life would be boring. But if nothing in life were certain, living day to day would be harrowing. Today, we often do too much of the former, and are exposed to too little of the latter.

I believe a defining characteristic of true resilience is the ability to handle uncertainty. To acknowledge the unknowns and plan your life in spite of them.

After every injury I’ve had, what future me “could do” became uncertain. And what current me can do, physically, is less because of what injuries I’ve suffered. That is a fact. But that doesn’t make the future any less dim. It just changes what the future looks like. This is my thought process now. It was not my thought process when I was injured.

Half of uncertainty is fear of the unknown. That can be treated with education. In fact, I’d argue education is the most common treatment. Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge. It is the very reason I know more than I should about matters of physical therapy, far outside my domain. Every injury I had scared me, but the fear became manageable with knowledge. This half is the easier half.

The harder half of uncertainty is simply being okay with it. To just sit there and say, “I have no idea if what I do next is going to pan out, but whatever happens, happens.” A part of it is accepting your new state so that you can do the things you have to do just to live. But another part is a fierce belief that you will be okay, regardless of the outcome. I do not mean physically okay. I refer to the belief that somehow, you could lose a limb and be better for it. We all want to live a vibrant life, and often the rapid closing of a door makes all the light in our life vanish. If instead we understand that a vibrant life is chosen, every day, over and over again, with conscious thought, then we will no longer be slaves to uncertainty. We will walk beside it.

I borrow this belief from stoicism, but I am no stoic, because I do not believe meditating on uncertainty, or on the negative outcomes, will make its acceptance any easier. In fact, I prefer to expect the best outcome and be crushed by the worst outcome, but still carry on all the same. Yet, I believe the ability to think this way is still doable. It requires practice.

Practice.

Handling uncertainty takes practice. But it’s not something I’d recommend people seek out willingly. Practicing being uncomfortable is a start, but nothing hits quite like the sudden loss of dreams or the shattering of expectations. Fortunately, like any skill, done enough times, it gets easier and easier. The emotions aren’t new. The enshrouding depression is no stranger. It’s rather refreshing. Because every life lived to the fullest experienced that same darkness. Flirting with the uncertainty in those moments gives every future action its meaning. I distinctly remember letting a depressive feeling pass over me while I was sitting on the couch, recovering from my ACL surgery, and immediately chuckling, thinking, “that’s funny, I’ve felt that before.” But it takes practice to not be cynical. It takes practice to experience emotions, but not yield to them. It takes practice to wake up every day when it feels as if the actions of the day will be meaningless. It takes practice to not view life as a graveyard of ambitions, but a library of lessons. It takes practice.

The worst part is you don’t get to decide when to practice. The opportunities are often few and far between, rendering any practice inefficient at best, obsolete at worst. What you control is how you want this practice session, this hell you are going through, to shape your understanding of the future.

When I was young, I don’t know if I would have chosen “resilient” as my answer to “what are you, Joraaver?” I was on the fence about publishing this post, because I still don’t believe it. I think I can handle some kinds of uncertainty well. There are plenty of other types of uncertainty I have yet to experience. What I know for certain, ironically, is that I helped one friend get through one hour of one day. That is a lesson I have taken from a book in my library. That alone is enough.