The Resiliency Myth with Soraya Chemaly

Years ago, when Nora was in the worst phase of her life (dead husband, dead dad, lost pregnancy) she heard a lot of people describe her as resilient. Those people meant it as a compliment, but to Nora it didn’t feel that way. She was tired, grieving, and lost so much in her life- the “resiliency” people saw was often just…the privilege she had to survive it. 

So when Nora got the new book, The Resiliency Myth by Soraya Chemaly, she devoured it. In this episode, Nora and Soraya talk about different ways to think about resiliency and how celebrating it can be a little toxic.

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Transcript:

Nora: I'm Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible, Thanks for Asking. In March 2024, we announced an indefinite hiatus, and it is not over. It is still indefinite, but we are going to be back in our main feed sporadically when we have something special to share with all of you. So, this episode. is Made Possible, sponsored by our premium subscribers.

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There is a word that I've hated for a long time, a word that many other people seem to love, or at least like a whole lot. A word that has wormed its way into our collective consciousness and simply won't leave. A word that I didn't think about much at all until people used it to describe me. And the sound of it felt like running into a plate glass window, which is yes.

That's something that I have done more than once. When they're clean, they're very hard to see. You can understand why so many birds fly into them. I get it. The word that I'm thinking of, the word that I so strongly dislike is resilient. And I am going to tell you why. Right now. Why I hate it. Because when people said to me, you're so resilient.

After I'd lost a pregnancy and my dad died and my husband died, I didn't know what they were talking about. I didn't feel resilient. I didn't feel anything unless I was feeling everything. In which case I felt like a bird. who had just flown full speed into a plate glass window, thinking that it was just a very shiny, clear blue sky.

And because I am, at my heart, an English major, I looked up the word resilient just to see what these people were thinking. And I got, you know, These definitions, which, yes, I'm going to read to you. Oxford, the fancy dictionary, gave me this. Able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.

Able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. And Merriam Webster gave me, capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture. Or tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. And none of those definitions felt. anything like me.

I was not withstanding anything. I was permanently deformed. I was not recovering from or adjusting easily to any of these changes or difficult conditions or misfortunes, as the dictionary liked to put it. We use the word resilient a lot and always like it's a good thing. Kids are resilient. Goldfish are resilient.

These new tires? Resilient. You know, minority groups, resilient. Black people specifically, resilient. But it sounds to me at least like an abdication. Like we are saying, hey, this person or group of people, this prize you won at the community fair and put in a plastic bag of water and let a toddler eat it.

Carry around. Don't worry. It's resilient. They have an innate sense of resilience that will take care of them. There's nothing for you to do. And it's probably fine to call a tire resilient. I don't think their feelings are going to be hurt. It's probably fine for a goldfish too. But if you are a goldfish and you are listening to this and you disagree, please reach out.

I don't want to speak for you.

For several years I have been giving, um, a keynote speech, one of my many, many jobs. Um, and I call it redefining resilience because people love alliteration. And it's a talk where I just kind of rail against these definitions because obviously, or obviously at least to me, my resilience in the face of grief and financial distress was not an inside job.

It was a direct reflection of my social safety net and my privilege. So when Aaron's medical debt piled up beyond what I could ever imagine owing, let alone paying, when I realized how expensive a funeral is and how much money we had saved, which was basically zero dollars, an online fundraiser popped up and thousands of people gave an average of 10 and boom, I wasn't drowning anymore.

I had a mother, that I could move in with and did. I had siblings who could and did step in and help with my son. I had former colleagues and friends who threw me small and manageable freelance jobs that I could do because I could no longer do my full time job emotionally or logistically or physically or spiritually.

I had resilience, but it wasn't Mine alone and treating it like it is a personal attribute is irresponsible. It's irresponsible and it is also related to our very American obsession with personal responsibility and growth and self help and the idea that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, can't you?

The setback is just a setup for the comeback after all.

Far from the only person who feels like this, far from the only person who feels like resilience needs a redefinition culturally, a rebrand. So enter today's guest. Soraya Chemaly is the author of the new book, The Resilience Myth, which I have read so far two and a half times. Her book is truly fantastic.

It traces how our modern definitions of resilience connect to everything from Dracula to Twilight to 9 11 to COVID to the birth of the self help industry and toxic positivity. If we have talked about it on this show, she talks about it in this book. I have underlined and highlighted so much of this book, sent pictures of passages to people.

I could not be more excited to bring this conversation with Soraya to all of you, because chances are, if you listen to this show, it's because you've been through something. And if you are in it right now, and if you feel like the word resilience is a personal attack or an extra scoop of pressure on your already very, very full plate.

This is for you.

So Soraya, tell me, what is the resilience myth? 

Soraya Chemaly: I think the core resilience myth is that we should be looking inside of ourselves to develop resilience. That it's a personality trait, a characteristic, a skill we can develop. And some of that is true, but in fact, the real of our resilience isn't our independence and our self sufficiency.

It's our interdependence and our mutual care and our collective. Um, leveraging our collective abilities. And so all the myths in this book kind of derive from that idea, but also delve really deeply into why we have that idea. Why have we invested so much in really a toxically individualistic ideal of strength and grit and optimism?

And again, all of those things. Definitely are good, but the problem is they have no limits in our culture, like many things. There's no sense that that was good in this context, in this application, but maybe we stop now. Maybe we consider limits, maybe we consider forbearance, maybe we recognize that stopping is good.

No, 

Nora: no, 

Soraya Chemaly: no, no. No, no. We can't do that. As gym 

Nora: teachers. As gym teachers taught us and, you know, youth sports coaches taught us at an early age, quitters never win and winners never quit. And if it can be on a poster in a gym, it must be true. It must be true. It must be true. There must be no exceptions. What got you into the topic of resilience?

Soraya Chemaly: That's a squirrely tale, isn't it? So I started off, uh, with a book proposal in December. It was really November, December of 2020. So before the pandemic and the entire proposal was about why our society doesn't value care, doesn't have an ethic of care, doesn't value care workers. Um, you know, we love mothers, but what we really love is motherhood.

We don't support people who do the care work. And we were well down that path, my agent, my editor and I, and then COVID hit and everything froze. And then in, April, around April, March, April of that year, we started talking again sort of six weeks in and my editor said, well, I think we're all traumatized and we're going to be traumatized.

And I said, uh, I think, yes, there's some trauma, but I actually think we have grief. There's a lot of grief. It's ambiguous grief. Those are different. And, and I would say that the, the trauma that people are going to experience really comes again from living in a culture that doesn't care enough for others.

And so she's like, I want you to write about this. And I said, well, let me do some writing, some researching. I'm really committed to this idea that I have of illuminating why care is so Such a core value that we need to embrace and I'll see how it works. And what I, the conclusion I came to with a few months was just, wow, what we're all told in the face of all this hardship and adversity is to be resilience, but that resilience model, again, is.

is based on not expecting care, not expecting help, not thinking that the society itself can provide material resources, sustain people, be kinder, any of those things. So that's how I got to this point. 

Nora: Everything in this book connects back to At least one or more topics that we have talked about on this show for the past seven, eight years.

One thing that the pandemic did do to me personally is eliminate all sense of time. Right. So I am living in a perpetual 2020. Yeah. Like it's just been the extended cut. I have no idea what year it is. day it is, month it is, at any given point in time. But part of this mythology that you are exploring in Resilience connects back to all of our American mythology about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps or Frontier mentalities.

Right. Yes. That's right. And the rugged individualism. And there was a, uh, connection that you made in the beginning of the book that was surprising to me between this collective obsession that feels semi recent to me, um, with resilience, maybe just because it was the immediate buzzword of the pandemic.

Yeah. And 9 11. Right. I need you to tell us about that. 

Soraya Chemaly: So this, this is, I think, really interesting culturally because 9 11 happened and it was a real shock to the system, right? Like everybody was, the whole world was shocked. The response in the United States was really, we're a resilient nation and, sorry, what nation isn't resilient, right?

Like every peoples will be resilient in the face of attack and. War and everyone will try their hardest, but we're a resilient nation. And that resulted in a few things. One, resilience became a national virtue. We're gonna bounce back. As George Bush famously said, go shopping, be normal, take you know, do the things that you would usually do.

And so there was a. assertion of Defending our traditions Returning to traditions. There was a hyper mothering that happened if you were a mom in the early aughts You had to be the best mom with the safest kind of mentality. And I know there's a lot of bashing of safetyism right now, which is a weird word in my mind anyway.

It's like, I don't even want to go there right now. But, but the fact is that like, right after 9 11, I remember I lived in DC, we had 9 11, and then we had anthrax in the mail, and then we had a sniper. So for example, in the year after 9 11, my toddlers and my preschool, my, my like, kindergartner couldn't go outside.

Right, that schools wouldn't let them outside, we couldn't go to parks, we couldn't open the mail. It was just the, you know, the city was under appal, like the country, but it was just like you were responsible. And so there was this insane mothering that happened. And it's like a manic mothering that happened for a lot of women.

And for men, I think it was a retrenchment of providing and protecting values. And then 2008 happened and threw the world into disarray, economic disarray. And so, throughout that all though, this notion of resilience. sort of snowballed. It was a virtue and then it became a programmatic aspect of corporate life and sports life and education.

And it kind of went hand in hand with the growth, the growth of positive psychology at the same time, because resilience is considered a positive attribute and it goes along with and builds on things like hardiness and optimism. And so by the time we get to the pandemic, we are in like two or three months in and people are like, Oh, this is going to last.

We're going to have problems. This is going to make school hard. This is going to make work hard. This is going to do everything. We need to be resilient again. And the models of resilience that got trotted out were so wrong for the moment. So like a lot of people went back to 9 11 resilience and said, I'm going to lead life like it's normal.

I'm going to go out. I'm going to, you know, we had politicians on the day that the nation was told to self isolate. There were politicians saying. Don't listen to that. Be resilient. Go out. Lead your life as normal. Don't be cowed by the enemy, which is this virus, like it's a, an enemy person that's coming to attack you.

Anyway, so it was really maladaptive form of resilience. Um, so there's sort of a trajectory from 9 11 on in which it became a product in and of itself.

Nora: Resilience was a word that when I heard it applied to myself. and my child after all of the things that sort of put me on, on this path to have this conversation with you and, you know, have this podcast and all of these things. When people said that to me, I took it as It like, you know, the feeling of just being like thunked right in the chest, right?

And like held at arm's length. That's what it felt like. It felt like people were saying to me, I don't have to worry about you, um, because you've got it. You've got it. You're like, it's, you know, you're strong. You've already gotten it. Meanwhile, I am absolutely not thriving. And this is as, you know, a middle class white woman with like.

quite a pretty good social safety net. Um, if I feel that way, how does it feel to other people? And the more I started to pay attention to that word, the more I disliked it because it does seem like a word that you apply to something that just doesn't have a lot of needs. And what do we not want? needy people.

We want capable people. And you mentioned the connection between resilience and masculinity. And I found in this book, it's so touching the way that you wrote about your father, because our dads were different men and also men of the same era and Paralleled backgrounds. My father was Irish Catholic, served in the military, went to Vietnam at age 17.

Um, did that masculine definition of resilience do to your dad? 

Soraya Chemaly: Well, this is the question, right? I mean, I probably, like you, have spent a lot of time thinking about this and I would, you know, the way I describe it is that he was resilient in the way we would recognize, you know, he, he, he emigrated to a new country, started a business from scratch in a new language, built a successful business, uh, provided for his family, um, was a really loving dad, but he was also traumatic childhood, was very rigid in his Catholicism and his gender norms, was very, um, he could be very emotional, but not, um, in a way that allowed him to show any real vulnerability at all.

And as he got older, he, that tension just resulted in a lot of self isolation. I think he was quite lonely. He developed alcoholism and there was never, you know, this is the complexity of this because he was really just trying to be a good man in the way he had been taught to be a good man. But the way he'd been taught to be a good man in very traditional ways was really self destructive because for him to admit to being, to in need or sad or anxious or any of those quote unquote feminine emotions, right?

And we're still teaching many boys that those emotions are not for them, that those feelings make them weak. Um, so he could never deal with them. And That hurt him. It hurt my mother. It hurt all of us. Um, and I think it's pretty common. I mean, I think the trajectory of, of what he experienced in his life is very common for a lot of men.

Um, but it is in fact, lockstep kind of the, the textbook definition of a certain kind of masculinity. And it's quite patriarchal. It's hierarchical. You listen to a higher authority. You do what you're supposed to do. You do what you're told. Um, you enforce certain rules. You fulfill certain roles. You don't question.

And so by the, you know, in the course of this book, I sort of come to a conclusion at the end that what a lot of people want isn't adaptability at all, it's just conformity. They want you to shut up and just do what you're supposed to do. 

Nora: Yeah. They want you to get back to normal without acknowledging that normal is fake and also normal changes, right?

What was normal for us. Let's go back to 9 11. What was normal for us before 9 11 was to walk people to the gate of an airplane and watch it take off in a wave, right? And now our children know that it is normal to take off your shoes, remove all of your electronics, and then be admonished by different TSA agents in different cities who will say, no, no, no, here, here, you keep your computer in your bag, you idiot.

Okay. Like here, you know, and, and, and normal changes. And that is such a. Yeah. 

Soraya Chemaly: And also normal for many people already is unsustainable, right? Like I wrote a chapter on adverse childhood experiences because well over 60 percent of Americans have. childhood experiences that have lifelong consequences for them.

And, um, those adverse experiences are defined differently now than they were in the early nineties. The levels of violence that American children are subjected to are just outrageous. And that's considered normal, right? Intimate partner violence, gun violence, um, just poverty, child poverty in the countries.

And yet that's normal. And so the question is, what is normal? Why would we ever want to bounce back to this normal, you know? And so resilience often assumes that you just don't want to rock the boat. You want to, you know, if something bad happens, you just want to return to the baseline that existed before, even though the baseline that existed before.

was so harmful and damaging and again, is not sustainable. 

Nora: Right. And that we're all working from different baselines as well. You mentioned ACEs and we have done, you know, a three part series on that years ago that I think we could even redo and have it be a completely new take on it because things are always changing.

We're always getting more knowledge. And what was so fascinating to me, Soraya, was the way that you pointed out that the. People who study resilience, who even popularized, uh, you know, some of these, these, these concepts that you're exploring in the book seem almost mystified at the way this word, uh, has, has been, uh, Sort of co opt, it has just sort of assumed a life of its own.

It's a 

Soraya Chemaly: giant word. It almost, yeah. 

Nora: Yeah. That no one can truly define. And it's, it's now, you wrote the fourth R in our education system. So if you're keeping track, that's reading, writing, arithmetic, which I still find so cute and resilience. 

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah. That's according to the APA, the American Psychological Association.

Isn't that amazing? 

Nora: Yeah. And so, but that definition of resilience in children often is equated with grit, with those gym class posters we were talking about where quitters never win and winners never quit. Why is that an incomplete at best? Look at what. It means to be a resilient child. 

Soraya Chemaly: Well, this is interesting because studies of schools and school programs show that even across schools, resilience is not defined the same way and no one has a standard for that.

So first of all, it's being used in different ways in different places. Secondly, a lot of schools use the marker of good grades to reflect what they think of as resilience. And that's pretty corrupting. metric, right? Especially for kids who are in stressful homes, because kids who are in very stressful homes will often excel academically in order not to cause more stress at home.

That doesn't actually mean they're resilient. It means they're stressed and anxious and performing. They're, it's a performative resilience. And what I find interesting about this is that in about 2006, so five years after 9 11, um, It became really common to talk about how upper middle class, uh, elite kids in elite schools lacked resilience.

And the irony of that was that it turned poverty and adversity into a resilience attribute. Right? Like we should be learning. It was kind of craven, right? We should be learning from the kids who are really powering through, even though, and 20 years on, we have a cottage industry of criticizing Gen Z kids.

You know, there's an entire slate of books about kids being coddled and not having fortitude and, you know, Which I think is real bullshit, right? These kids just have a different set of values. That's a different discussion. They have a different way of understanding the world. They're digital natives.

They are interconnected in ways that older people really struggle to understand. They are interested in discourse and, you know, not debate. I mean, there's so many virtues to their approach gets masked, but one of the things that many of these kids who do tend to be in elite institutions or have more resources, one of the things that is true about them is that they express their distress.

They're emotionally, they're emotionally, um, competent enough to say, I am feeling anxious. And, um, however you define it entitled or comfortable or whatever. They can say that because someone said you can say that, right? But what they then say is, this is uniform. One of the key reasons why I'm feeling this way is parental distance and absence.

Um, and in particular in many of these schools, the absence of a, of a father who's engaged. And yet no one talks about that, right? No one talks about the fact that however you define resilience, it's ultimately relational. It ultimately has to do with whether you feel belonging, meaning. connection to people, because all of the attributes of self sufficiency and independence that we can develop, they are usually built on a strong foundation of someone having cared for us at some point.

Even one person, like kids with many aces, if they even had one person. who did that for them, they have better life outcomes than kids with no ACEs who had no person. 

Nora: Yeah. The protective factor, right? The protective factors of it all. Yeah. Right. There's, there's even the way that we, when we talk about children and resilience, uh, You mentioned, you know, kids who might not be considered resilient are also kids who know their limits or are willing to speak their limits.

So if we're defining resilience as simply never giving up, then what we are really identifying is a kid who's good at suffering in silence. And perfectionism. And perfectionism. Perfectionism. Boy, if that didn't ring my bell. 

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah, just the idea that you can eternally grow. Like, is there no, is there never a time when you're good enough?

Is there never a time when you can say, I can be satisfied? That this, this is, I, I did my best. I tried my hardest. This is maybe not for me. Maybe I can do something else. And I was really struck by Angela Duckworth's work because when she wrote Grit, she based it on some studies that she did in different contexts.

And one of them was in military academies and in the. Um, first class is, it's kind of a test, a litmus test, who's going to make it through. And in the study, the kids who didn't make it through, didn't have grit. And one of the things that the kids who made it through said was, I always finish what I start.

But yet the kids who left maybe also finished what they started, which was to figure out what they wanted or what they were good at, or what maybe they didn't want, you know? And so I think it's really important, obviously, as a parent, I feel this too, but to listen and to say, okay, well, Let's talk about that.

Let's, if you don't want to do it and believe me, I've, I have three high performing athletic girls. I've stood on many, many fields in my life and they're giving 

Nora: up so many weekends, 

Soraya Chemaly: so many weekends, years of weekends, but there are parents who have no limits at all. There are parents who are standing there yelling at kids until they're crying, you know, and, and what they believe they're doing is teaching them how to be tough and how to achieve their goals, but maybe they're doing other things too that aren't worth that level of parental pressure, you know?

Nora: Oh, yeah. I, uh, there, when you pointed out the number of stress injuries that kids are facing, because now they're specializing in a sport so young. Right. Or two or three 

Soraya Chemaly: sports, you know? Yeah. We were very bad parents because we told our children they could do, like, One, sorry, one travel sport. 

Nora: Yeah. One, one activity.

I'm like, one activity. Right. You can choose one activity and that's the activity. So pick it wisely. 

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah. But they had so many classmates and teammates who would go to like a practice from four to six and then get in the car and then drive to the practice that was from seven to nine and do their homework and eat dinner in the car.

So it was like soccer and then basketball. And there were lots of injuries and there was. I mean, we, for example, every family has their own thing, but if you prioritize rest and family time, that makes you very contracultural, right? It makes you, uh, you're, you're flying in the face of certain values in, in, you know, striving values.

Um, It's hard. It's hard to, it's hard to resist. 

Nora: It really is. You mentioned, you know, are you ever allowed to just exist? Um, must we always be growing? And it's, uh, I think what's so intoxicating about that mindset, this idea that all of these attributes are all an inside job, is, you know, That it does give you, you know, when things are working, right, an abnormal sense of yourself and of your own power.

And when things aren't working, an abnormal and inappropriate sense that everything is your fault. When in reality That's right. Everything's on you. Everything's on you. And there's, you know, I, I, I am trying to just, you know, keep my eyes on my own paper, mind my own business. But there was a, uh, self help author who was posting constantly, you know, pithy little sayings, but one that he repeated over and over was, you know, if you're, if you're not growing, you're dying.

If you're not growing, you're dying. When in nature is that true? Never. Never. And, and then he died. Because he was struggling with addiction without telling anybody. You know what I mean? And I feel deeply sad for him and his family and all these people who, like, that he had, you know, the worst case scenario is not that he didn't believe this and he was selling it.

It's that he did believe it. He did believe 

Soraya Chemaly: it. That's 

Nora: right. He did believe it. He did believe it. And that it's all tied up in our, there's, there's a crazy Venn diagram of everything that you're talking about. And what I love so much about this book is nobody would ever think that our great American virtue of resilience would be connected to all of these other, uh, self helpy, good on their face, things that actually really do harm us as well.

And I want, I'm going to make a little pivot because I think I'm going to get you to say exactly what you want to say right now. Which is like, there's so much connection between this and our very American need To be positive. 

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, 100. Don't you know it? For 

Nora: everything to be positive. 

Soraya Chemaly: 100%. 

Nora: I want you to tell me about positive psychology, but first I want you to tell me about something that you taught me in this book, which is optimism bias.

Soraya Chemaly: Well, we have optimism bias, right? We want to believe that the bad things won't happen to us. And I really talked about that, like a personal story for me was I refused to deal with climate change. It was too overwhelming for me. It was scary. And I just thought, no, it won't happen. It won't happen because how could that happen?

Right. And some of that's just denialism, but some of it is also optimism bias until it happened. in my own life. And I was like, well, you really can't do that anymore. But the chapter on optimism was actually one of the most interesting and fun for me to write, because I was really taken by the fact that Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, one of the best selling books of all time around the globe, still in print, Published in 1952, he was Donald Trump's mentor, and not only was he his mentor, but the Trump family would drive every weekend to his church to listen to him, and he married Donald Trump twice.

If you look at Donald Trump's language and his ethos, it's like flipping through the chapter titles of Norman Vincent Peale's books. And his books were really written for the golden age of American sort of white male technocratic, capitalist, Um, globalism, right? Like the, the power that was inherent in the, in the country at that time.

And a lot of very affluent businessmen gravitated towards them. It's like, he was like the prosperity gospel version of that time. But Trump shaped his life around some of these things and his. presidency was bookmarked by this unhinged delusional optimism. Oh, millions of people were at my inauguration.

And of course I won the presidency. That's the big lie that I didn't. And the weird thing is, like, I think I would feel better if I thought he knew he was lying, but I actually don't think he knows he's lying. And that's more dangerous, right? And so we are the country of positive thinking. Um, if you just work hard enough, you're going to do well.

And, um, don't look on the dark side when in fact the virtue of optimism is not being optimistic so much as knowing when to use it. It's really cognitive flexibility. And so being strategically pessimistic is also really important to resilience because when you're pessimistic, you Assess your situation.

You have better situational awareness. You can look at risks. You can anticipate risks. You can avoid risks. You can reduce the chances that you're going to have a hardship. But if you just refuse to be pragmatic, you don't do any of those things. If you just think things are going to work out, you don't take the steps necessary to maybe avoid problems or achieve goals in a different way.

Nora: And people are so afraid of being labeled negative or pessimistic. Um, but there's kind of a power of pessimism that Viktor Frankl called, I think, was it tragic optimism? 

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah. He, he wrote a lot about it and, and he attributes it to his ability, his, his survival. You know, he said the people who were really optimistic.

And this happened again in Vietnam with prisoners, um, prisoners of war, American prisoners of war. The ones who were the most optimistic, who thought they're going to come get us, were going to be, they were the most crushed. They were the ones who could not persevere. And it's interesting too, because this has a connection to faith.

A lot of, um, a lot of optimism, a lot of resilience. Surveys and scales have the metric of faith or do you have faith or spirituality? And what I think is interesting about that is that in fact that suggests that the thing that is allowing you to be resilient is a divinity. Right? If you have faith or spirituality, it's because you have a belief in a divinity, when in reality it's probably that your faith or your spirituality gives you access to a community that you feel belonging and that supports you, right?

But people who feel strongly, a strong belief in God and are optimistic as a result, when something bad happens, they are less resilient because they feel betrayed. Right? They feel that their God betrayed them and it's much harder for them to then adapt to whatever the circumstances are, um, because it's not just that they have suffered a loss or a tragedy, but that their worldview has been shattered.

Nora: Yeah. If, if God has a plan, why would he give you such a bad one? 

Soraya Chemaly: Right. And if I've been a good person. 

Nora: Yeah. 

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah. If I've followed all the rules. and I've been a good person. Why is this bad thing happening? 

Nora: Yeah. When I think you and I both know that bad people live forever. Yeah, they do. The worse you are, the longer you get to, they just get to stick in there.

And then, yeah, you know, no one's ever like, yeah, he died young and he was a real bastard. It's always a terrible person. It's like, Nope. Sorry. Sorry. That guy. That guy stays.

We talked about this before we pressed record. As a culture, as a world, um, we are all burned out, exhausted, depleted, and a part of the resilience myth is this connection to our productivity, right? Our ability to bounce back and get back to work. And you would not believe this. But it is true. As. I was preparing for this conversation.

I got a DM from a woman who, uh, told me that she has unlimited PTO at her company, which of course is not really unlimited because they are keeping track of it, but she took a day and a half. off between finding out that she was having a miscarriage and her DNC and was praised for being tough and showing up.

And then when she asked for more time off, um, for the expected due date of this baby that she lost, they were like, uh, that's kind of a lot of days. How much more days do you think you'll need this year? Why is this situation, this specific DM, Ernest Shackleton's fault. 

Soraya Chemaly: So, you know, this is really interesting.

The model of Ernest Shackleton, Arctic Explorer, as a leader, as a resilient person who, you know, through the worst circumstances in recorded history, saved his team. No one ever talks about the fact that he put them in danger to begin with, against the advice of many people who said, don't go there right now, right?

That's a whole other thing. But he was optimistic and he was, um, He never, he had faith and he was hardy and he, it goes without saying, was physically tough and mentally tough, right? And so this model of resilience is that you keep doing the work, right? Even though they were isolated on an ice flow with no way to leave.

and might die. They went through, he made sure that they worked and they did their routines and they did all the things and they were productive because that was really important. And probably, yes, that probably helped avoid people spinning into anxiety and despair and all the other things. That kind of model made its way into the military and also into corporate cultures.

And capitalism, again, we were talking about this, but you, you know, productivity is the engine. Right. And, and it's an engine that runs on the unpaid labor of women in the society. And so what you just described brings those two things together because now we of course have women who are workers and being paid and expected to also reproduce.

And I think every woman I know who has gestated and given birth, probably understands the feeling in this country that you give birth and then you get back on your feet as fast as possible. There's no sense that you have the right to heal or rest or take care of yourself or God forbid be taken care of by people whose only job it is is to make sure you're okay for a few days, you know.

And um, I don't know necessarily that. Americans understand that there are places in the world, many places, where that's just barbaric, right? Where, how could you possibly do that? How can you expect a, a woman to give birth and come right back to work, which happens every day. Happens every day. You know?

Happens 

Nora: every day. And you get maybe six weeks off of part time pay. if you have a full time job that offers that benefit and you probably are checking your email and then you come back to work and you're pumping in a closet and sometimes there's a man in that closet taking a conference call because he decided he needed a quiet place.

And so your boobs explode all over your outfit and then you have to go home, but your boss is mad at you. I'm just putting that out there as a potential example of something that could happen to somebody. 

Soraya Chemaly: But also Yeah, and just think about the fact, think about how many stories we've seen where it's like this woman is a champion because she was taking conference calls while she was in labor.

Like, you know, I'm hoping actually that in the past couple of years those have become less popular, but they were just par for the course, things like that, you know, and we just love those stories of people who pick themselves up and dust themselves off and do the hard thing. And it's the same logic as the individual acts of kindness that are somehow supposed to make up for the complete lack of systemic material resources and care in the society.

And so that model of resilience, again, is based on you should be working, you should be productive. And just for the record, the work that we do as carers is not considered productive according to GDP. It doesn't count, right? What we do as mothers or caretakers of parents or people who do domestic care for our families.

That just doesn't register in the books. And so until that's fixed, I think we have other, you know, we need to fix that. And that's been a 40 year debate since Marilyn Waring wrote a book called If Women Counted, um, and then got New Zealand to actually change their accounting system. But we're 40 years later and that just hasn't happened, you know.

And so you end up with a woman who miscarries, who's grieving. And who is being told, well, you have to show up. 

Nora: Or like, thank you for showing up. You're so tough. That's so great. You only needed that one day. 

Soraya Chemaly: Right. And so much of the resilience programming in corporations is highly individualized again, right?

You don't want, no corporation is going to say the path to resilience is labor organizing. Okay, that's never going to happen, but the path to resilience is labor organizing, right? You cannot meditate your way out of low pay. You cannot write a gratitude journal that's going to get you you know, bereavement days or, or maternal leave or paternal leave or whatever.

That's not how this works. 

Nora: Yeah. There's no, there's no amount of bubble baths that will, you know, close the gap between your expenses and your paycheck and the limited amount of hours that you have in a day, even though a meme will encourage you to believe that you have the same number of hours in the day as Beyonce, even though no, no, no, she has many more hours because.

She is, she, she's, I don't know when the last time she went to a grocery store is, you know? She just has many more people. We'd all have more hours if we had more people. Um, and you mentioned, you know, the resilience training, right? Resilience becoming, and this blew my mind, a 90 billion corporate cottage industry.

Resilience training. And, and, and. Ernest Shackleton, you know, being used as the model of resilience, uh, getting his, his men through. He didn't lose a single person, but he did leave his wife bankrupt and, and his children fatherless when he went back after being told not to go. 

Soraya Chemaly: Not to go. Yeah, and his personal characteristics, this one man's personal characteristics are two of the measures on the most highly used resilience scale.

Um, I think it's, um, faithfulness and optimism, maybe, those two, faithfulness and optimism. And I laugh because he, it's a pretty good illustration. He was famous for being optimistic, but his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, Lieutenant was famous for being pessimistic. And so together they made one cognitively flexible unit of leadership.

Together they had a whole brain. Like together. But he could, he could afford to be optimistic because someone else was doing the work of thinking about the bad shit. Do you know what I mean? And I think that happens in a lot of people's lives. The people who are like, no it'll all work out, usually have someone around who's making it work out because they're worried or stressed or saying, well I better do it because that person's not going to do it.

And I write a lot about the notion of self sufficiency and productivity, similarly relying on other people's invisible work, you know, like men working and being ideal workers and dedicated workers. But only made possible by the work of a housewife, you know, and so I think, I think it's worth noting. 

Nora: Yeah.

I, I really do make sure to tell any person who will ever listen that a part of my success can be attributed to the fact that since 2019, I've had a stay at home husband who I've not folded a piece of laundry. I've been a, I've been a man. I've been my grandfather. Both of my grandmas, right? I've, I am living my grandfather's lives right now.

Um, because somebody else folds my underwear, cooks, cleans, makes dentist appointments for the kids, plans our vacations, everything, right? All of that care work is taken care of. And after watching women in my life suddenly be completely devalued once they no longer wanted to be married to the man that they were doing all this work for, I made sure to put it all in writing.

So that he has a safety net, should he not want to be married to me anymore? So we are actually valuing the work he has put in to all of this as a family. And so if you are a stay at home parent, uh, right now, have that conversation, have that conversation while you still love each other. Um, because there really is like a very, there's an incredible.

monetary and mental health value to it. And on his side, a cost, right? Like I did not even conceive, right. Opportunity cost. Opportunity cost and also just, you know, the, the fatigue of it all. And I did not even think about, I didn't realize how much I extra I was carrying in that until he took it all off of me.

And I realized, Oh my gosh, I was doing all of that. And all of this, which by the way, Most people are. Most women are. But, um, yeah, I think, uh, you know, you, you, you mentioned that when corporations are talking about building a resilient staff, what that ends up being is more money at the top and no money at the bottom.

Soraya Chemaly: Well, it ends up that they're pouring a lot of money into these resilience programs to try and teach people individualized skills, like learn how to meditate, learn how to regulate your emotions. Um, really and truly things like keep a gratitude journal. And these are kind of deflections, right? They're not really about how to build a healthier workplace.

They're really about how to to cope with an unhealthy workplace instead. And, you know, you and I were just talking about the sort of division of labor in mainly heterosexual couples, but most families are not in heterosexual couples anymore, you know, and so you have a system whereby single women, particularly, Black single women and women of color who are single parenting are the most impoverished in the society.

14 times more likely to be impoverished in the United States than in a peer nation, right? Because our entire system is kind of optimized for the idealized family where a man goes out to work still, right? Where a man goes out to work and a woman does domestic work at home. And the taxation system is still structured around that largely with workplace expectations are still structured, even though we've been talking about this for so long now, it has stayed pretty rigid, um, at the top and in our, in our governance.

And so I think that it's, It's interesting that there's a real anti capitalist, anti productivity movement led by black women who are like, no, no more. We can't do this anymore. And Tricia Hersey started the NAP ministry, I think in the middle of the pandemic. And it's because she was a single mother, she was in school, she was working multiple jobs, and she found that she was so exhausted she was just sleeping everywhere.

And she thought, well, what if I just rested? You know, and then she turned it into sort of art performance, and now it's an entire movement. And she's written a great book about it that I talk about in my book. I think that It's really hard for us because we wrap productivity into our identities. You know, it's hard to rest.

It's hard to say, I'm not going to do something right now. I'm just going to not do anything. You know, that's virtually impossible for a lot of people. Yeah. 

Nora: Yeah. It is like, uh, It, even though the labor movement was eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what you please. But now it's more like 12, 16 hours of work, four hours of sleep, and then four hours of anxiety.

Um, or who knows what, um, what you know, what you please like. Right? And, and a weekend, two days for what you please. And now it's like, no, nobody has that. It's really, um, it's just, I don't know. God. Goddamn. Sorry, everybody. Um, part of, uh, our resilience mythology and our positive psychology is also the speed at which we expect ourselves to evolve.

Yeah, the urgency. Tell me about Island Time. 

Soraya Chemaly: So this is really interesting because for people who maybe haven't read much about how white supremacy works, urgency is a characteristic of white supremacy and it makes its way in lots of different ways. ways in the, in the culture. But the way I kind of describe it is I come from an Island.

My family's from Haiti and the Bahamas, and my ancestors come from many different places. It's really, we're pot cakes, just throw things in there and we come out, right? Like we don't really, but, but there's, you, you get used when you're, when you grow up in a place like that, to a kind of condescension about Island time and people say it, If they're on vacation, they're like, Oh, we're using Island time.

And it's kind of funny, but it's also not funny because what it actually means is that it's slower here. And that actually means you're not with it. You're not modern. It's actually a slight allusion to an inferiority because in our modern worldview, speed is what's good. Speed is what gets you to progress.

Speed is what makes you superior. And in fact, in terms of racialized. What you end up with is things like colonialism, which institutionalizes racial hierarchies, using the idea of speed as a form of dominance and associating speed and associating progressiveness with ultimately white men who are at the apex of all that is good and new and modern and technologically advanced.

And if you're on an island, you don't have any of that, right? If you're on an island, it's slow and lazy and corrupt. And so that expression island time. Is it kind of a backhanded compliment? But what I argue instead is that in fact, if we consider what Island Time means, it often means to people living in those places that you don't live in a culture of disconnect.

You don't live in a culture of disconnect from nature. Um, from your own emotions or your own self or the people around you that is required by a culture of urgency and domination all the time. I thought it was beautiful, 

Nora: honestly. It's like, especially with the way that you spoke about island time and grief.

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah. I mean, I think grief is complicated. You know, and the grief that I felt for my father's loss, he died during COVID and I couldn't go home. But that was also simultaneously a weird experience of climate grief happening because Hurricane Dorian hit just a few months before and just made, It made climate change disaster.

You couldn't look away from it if you were in that part of the world. It devastated two islands completely, like eviscerated everything. There was nothing but pulp left. And so I really had to reconsider what grief meant, um, because I had been sort of fortunate enough to keep it in a box where I could think, well, you know.

You lose something, a person, and then you mourn, and then you move on. And that's just not how grief works. You know, and you, you have been so exceptionally generous with yourself in explaining this to people. You know, I mean, I think what you've done for people is just an enormous gift. So yes, I don't feel like I can speak to grief the way, the way you have, but I certainly I certainly associate grief with an embodiment and in my own embodiment with islands and their environment.

I thought your 

Nora: grief writing was beautiful and deeply affecting, so I never want to hear you say that again. I really, I was like, Oh, this is, this is it. Like the, uh, I mean, I think I highlighted it. If you want me to quote you back to you, which is my personal hell, but, um, I don't, you wrote something about like, just like the collapsing of time and then like the meandering of like grief where I was like, Oh yeah.

Oh God. I don't, I just, I really loved that. And I loved that reclamation or redefinition of Island time as a way of saying like, well, This is, this is how we recognize our connection to each other and where we are too. Um, 

Soraya Chemaly: right. And also, yeah, I mean, I think that we don't understand, I think what a lot of people are experiencing in terms of the climate is that they are grieving.

It's such an ambiguous grief and we don't name it very well, and. It's hard to put words to because you're actually missing something that hasn't even been lost quite yet. So it's anticipatory grief, you know, and, and it's also just sadness that, frankly, I think our stupidity. 

Nora: Yeah. And our disconnectedness too.

And you can't, you know, think your way out of, you know, the, the, the earth, uh, the people on it, the systems on it cannot be resilient in the face of. So much individualism that really just came down to money, you know, and power. 

Soraya Chemaly: Money, competition, win, dominate. And that's the resilience model that we have is grounded in those beliefs.

It's grounded in a survival of the fittest as opposed to a mutual care model where we survive, we sink or swim together, you know, and so there's no way that that model of resilience is going to help us survive what we have to go through now. 

Nora: How do we start to deprogram ourselves and our culture from this individualistic view of resilience?

Where do we go from here? 

Soraya Chemaly: Well, you know, I've been really heartened. Nothing that I'm saying about collectivity and solidarity and mutual care is new. People have been saying this for decades and centuries. Indigenous cultures, people have been talking about this. Movements around the world, be they labor movements or feminist movements, have been talking about this.

The movement for Black Lives has been talking about this. But I think what is hard is that we can say words like solidarity. It won't be meaningful until we wrap the belief into our own identities. Right? If we think we're going to maintain this level of individualism and internal power, and yet still be able to engage in collective, collectivity, I, I don't think that's going to happen.

We actually have to change our worldview so that we believe deeply in the common good. Again, there's no common good anymore, you know, and we just went so deeply overboard. Selfishly overboard. Um, and it took centuries, right? But what happened in our lifetimes is the great acceleration. Everything has been compressed.

Everything has been faster. Everything has been more intense. And so all of the tensions and the harms are just compounding and highly visible. But I do think that I personally, I'm just of an age where I've been winnowed down to early childhood education is probably the most important thing that we can do right now.

Um, and that that's just me, but I, but I do think people should begin by openness to other world views. You know, we, we, have a really exceptionalist, we, we, we believe in American exceptionalism to our own peril. And we believe in a universe and things like universal human rights sound great until you realize that there's a pluriverse of ideas, a pluriverse of worldviews, uh, many multiple ways of thinking about how we relate and how we should build societies.

And we just need to really listen to people. 

Nora: Thank you so much, Soraya. I love your book so much. Thank you so much.