Upside-Down Wisdom #22: Building Resilience
“You have to build resilience.”
“You have to build resilience.”
It sounds encouraging. Empowering, even.
Like resilience is a muscle. Or a skill.
Something you earn through struggle. Something you gain through suffering.
Just keep going. Power through.
Fail forward. Fall down seven times, get up eight.
You’re not resilient yet—but you could be, if you try hard enough.
And if not, don’t worry—there’s a class for that.
Or a book. Or a 5-step program.
Because apparently resilience is something you have to learn.
But here’s the thing:
That’s upside-down.
Because it treats resilience as something outside of you.
Something you develop. Something you acquire.
Something that wasn’t there when you needed it most.
But resilience isn’t something you build.
It’s something you uncover.
It’s already baked into the system.
Like gravity. Or a heartbeat.
Even in your worst moments, it’s never gone—just temporarily obscured by thought.
You don’t become resilient.
You are resilient.
Because the system is always resetting.
The mind is always clearing.
And something deeper in you knows how to begin again, every time.
Here’s today’s Upside-Down Wisdom:
You don’t have to build resilience. You’re made of it.
This is Upside-Down Wisdom—a series where we flip the script on the conventional "wisdom" we've been taught. If you would like to read other posts in this series, please visit the Upside-Down Wisdom page.