“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”

— Yousuf Karsh

Resilience is not glamorous.

It is rarely if ever celebrated.

There is no certificate at the end of the process.

And you are not necessarily more resilient while it is happening, or immediately after.

In fact, you often feel the opposite.

That you are a victim.

That the situation is unfair.

That you are embarrassed about how things went down.

That you are angry at yourself.

That you wish you were a tougher person.

And then, after some time, you are not.

The older you get, the more you realise that hardship is ubiquitous.

It comes in all shapes and sizes, but it is universal.

Your relationship ends.

You lose something that you love.

You are the one who lets someone down.

The last one might be the hardest.

We think of resilience as a quality that makes us calm in the face of adversity.

Makes us strong.

Makes us unbreakable.

I think this is the wrong way to think about it.

I think you can be broken, and then put back together again.

Maybe that’s resilience, too.

There are things that other people tell you about heartbreak and betrayal and loss that are helpful.

But there are also things that you have to learn for yourself.

You can be warned about the sting of a broken heart, but you can’t be warned about your own heart.

You can be told how devastating it is to be rejected, but you can’t be prepared for the feeling of it.

Same with grief.

You can read about the stages of loss and what to expect, but when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t know what to expect.

You don’t know how it will feel to lose someone, or something, or some version of the life you thought you’d have.

You don’t know what it will be like to be scared.

You don’t know how easy it is to extrapolate one bad thing to everything in your life.

You don’t know what you’ll do when you’re faced with something you can’t control, or when the people around you seem out of your control.

You don’t know who you’ll turn to, or who you’ll run from.

You don’t know who you’ll become.

Maybe that’s where some of your resilience comes from, too.

The things you’ve been through teach you about yourself.

They give you information.

Experience is information.

Other people can give you helpful information, too, but it’s not the same.

That’s why the first real heartbreak feels so massive, because you have no information about what comes next, and later you have information about what comes next.

You remember that feeling of devastation and how it passed.

You remember that the thing you thought would end your life turned out to be just a speed bump.

That helps, too, when the next thing happens.

It doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it easier.

It matters more than we often give it credit for, especially if you’ve spent your life trying to avoid other people’s disappointment.

People-pleasing is rooted in all sorts of predictions about what other people will think about you.

If I say no, they’ll be disappointed.

If they’re disappointed, something bad will happen.

If they think badly about me, I won’t be able to handle it.

So you say yes, and you explain everything away, and you do whatever it is they want you to do.

And then, inevitably, someone is disappointed in you anyway.

Maybe you finally said no, or maybe you made a decision they didn’t want you to make, or maybe you stopped doing the things they wanted you to do.

You discover something important about yourself, and maybe about them, too.

They are disappointed, and you are disappointed, too.

It’s not the end of the world.

A few days pass, and life goes on.

I think that’s how some of us learn to stop believing all those predictions other people have planted in our brains.

We stop believing that one disappointment will lead to a string of disappointments, or that one disappointment will destroy us, because we have evidence to the contrary.

This is why I think the phrase “hardship makes you stronger.” is misleading.

Sometimes hardship makes us bitter.

Sometimes it makes us fearful.

Pain can teach us the wrong lessons, too.

What matters is what we do with that pain.

Karsh’s photograph is made in darkness, but darkness alone doesn’t make a photograph.

Something has to happen in that darkness for it to become a photograph.

Maybe that’s how it works with character, too.

Hardship reveals things to us.

It shows us what we need.

It shows us what we’re afraid of.

It shows us how much of our life is spent trying to make other people comfortable, or keep other people comfortable.

Once we’ve seen those things, we can’t unsee them.

And the next time we’re faced with a similar situation, we are more prepared to handle it differently, because we have more information.

Because we’ve seen what’s there, in the dark.