Resilience Isn’t a Destination
(You’re Doing It Right Now)

by Brooke Warner

Recently, on my personal Substack, I wrote about how writing memoir is hard. In some ways it feels like a juvenile protest to say so. Writing memoir is hard! But our juvenile protests are also important because they rise up inside of us, asking for validation.

No one in my adult life really cares that writing memoir is hard. If I were to protest to my partner, or my best friend, they may well say, “Then stop.” Or, “No one is forcing you to write your memoir.” I could stop, true. No one is forcing me, that’s right. But I don’t want to stop, and I am determined to keep going. But sometimes I want to be able to say, “It’s hard.” Sometimes, in fact, I want to be able to scream it!

This is where resilience comes into the picture because to stay the course with writing memoir, you have to be resilient. We don’t always see our own resilience, especially when we’re slogging through the muddy middles of our journeys. Rarely do I see memoirists patting themselves on the back, giving themselves encouragement, reminding themselves how awesome they are. This is not something most people are conditioned or even encouraged to do.

Instead, most people are conditioned to berate themselves, to cut themselves down, to work to ward off a chorus of inner critics telling them their writing is not that great, their story has already been done, and who’s going to read this book anyway? So there!

Which is why I want to write about resilience today, and to remind you that if you’re doing the work of writing, you’re doing the work of resilience. If you’re sitting down to write, you’re refusing to let your story go unwritten. And that refusal—that quiet insistence that no one gives you any credit for—is resilience.

When I teach my six-month memoir class, I sprinkle in a fair amount of motivation reminders. I ask writers to consider what motivates them, partly to have something to hold onto, or to fall back on, when the going gets tough. You will put down your memoir from time to time, sometimes for months or years at a time. If you’ve ever done that and come back to it, you’re practicing resilience.

This journey is not for the fainthearted. It takes the time it takes because when you write memoir, you’re showing up in two capacities. You’re the person who lived the experience and you’re the person who came through the other side to tell about it. Sometimes the effort to reexperience the past is actually retraumatizing. Writing about what happened to us is raw, often fraught, takes time to process. It can feel risky to expose yourself and others. You may spend as much time thinking about the consequences of putting your work out into the world as you do doing the actual writing. And this is normal.

Resilience is about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wait till it’s safe to publish your work. But too often we’re putting the publishing cart before the writing horse. We must write, and explore our feelings, and get our bearings long before we determine what will live in the bound pages of a final book.

f you feel that protest I mentioned at the start, you’re actually building your resilience muscles. If you ever want to scream at your memoir, or even if you have, coming back to it again afterward is resilience. I’m 45,000 words into my memoir and part of my protest is that I feel like I’m only halfway up a mountain that’s already taken me three years to climb. Some days I feel surges of emotions—like frustration or anger. But then, diving back into it, again and again, reminds me that the only way forward is one word at a time. We’re doing the work. We’re doing the climb.

So, if you’re in the middle of a draft that’s fighting you, or if you’re trying to get back to a manuscript you set down six months ago, or if you’re asking yourself whether your story is worth telling, don’t worry for one instant that you’ve given up. Resilience doesn’t announce itself. It’s quiet and steady, and all it looks like is opening the document one more time.

You’ve got this!

If you’re moved to share a word of encouragement for yourself or others, please do. We’re not often given a place or permission to give ourselves validation.

Read on Substack if you’d like to leave comments.

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