Why I Stopped Writing about Resilience

Two years ago…

I was giving up my life of running I had planned out. I was feeling sorry for myself. One knee replacement down. One to go. The words of ‘you must never run again’ echo around my days. What else was there? I had given up my legal career for a life being outdoors, coaching, running, and exploring the world with my two feet, only to find out that my knees would not support me. I wanted to find a way to cope with this. I wanted to see a way out. I wrote about it on a page to try to make some sense of it. I started a podcast about resilience because I thought that was the word I needed. To explore how I protected myself from feeling like this. To make it go away.

One year ago…

I felt like I had walked down a walled path. I had long ago left my legal career and didn’t feel like I would fit in an office again. I knew the aching sadness of commuting away from my house in the countryside to work in soulless offices. I didn’t want to do that again. I had to make it work with what I had. Which, for a lot of the past year, had been speaking about resilience, speaking about coming through tough times. I signed up to deliver some workshops and talks with a corporate trainer. I contacted some keynote speaking agencies. I thought making the best of my life was to talk about what I knew. I thought it was to help others feel less alone, less pain, when they were going through tough times. A service to others was a good life. An alchemy to turn my darkness into gold. I thought I needed to be a voice of resilience. I didn’t see an alternative either.

Today…

Last night I stood in my garden as the light faded over the loch. I outstretched my arms. I didn’t need to alchemise it. I didn’t need to turn my tough years of my life into my career, into goodness and service. It wasn’t the only road. I have stepped onto a different path. One that took me away from what I knew and was known for. And it was the best thing I could have done.

I didn’t plan to talk about resilience. I have thoroughly enjoyed recording my podcast, so much that I intend to keep it going, albeit at a slower pace than before, despite full-time hours and other projects. If you had asked me about plans for my income and work a year or two ago, I would have had plenty to talk about. I had my book and subsequent talks. A podcast I was planning to grow and monetise. A book a quarter written about resilience, and a head full of ideas of what I wanted to say. But maybe it was formed too much in my head. Full of logic about my skills and what I had to offer. My heart was pulling me another way.

‘What you focus on becomes your reality’

The goal was never to master resilience. The goal I had was always to step beyond the grief and sorrow and go back to a lightness I longed for. Looking back, creating a life talking about resilience kept me stuck in the place where I was hurting. What I focussed on was becoming my reality. For me, focusing on those times wasn’t getting me beyond them. Just as I wrote about stepping away from a place of running being my identity, I now needed to step away from resilience being my identity. I didn’t know it at the time, but my heart knew it. Something pulled me towards looking at jobs on the Scottish Parliament website last September. I can’t really explain it. I was drawn to looking for a way to go back to my legal life, and I wondered if there was an opportunity to sit quietly and draft bills to come to Parliament. In the end, I found something much more lively, working in a team for a political cause I believe in.

Life became fuller around last October. I started working part-time in politics. I started training regularly with the Mountain Rescue Team. Both brought me new people who knew nothing about me, or my running, or anything that had come before. It was a step away from that old life, dropping that old baggage.

I started the New Year with two focuses. Maybe you call them manifestations or maybe not. One was to move up to full-time work in my job. One was to canoe. The universe delivered on the first within a few months. The second is about to come. (I was hoping for a windfall of money to allow me to buy a kayak or canoe for the second request. I visualised myself paddling in the water over and over again. This month, a canoe leader is setting up a local club for us to try out canoes at very minimal cost. The universe has brought me exactly what I was visualising.)

As I began more hours at my desk at work, I found myself stepping away from my computer once my time became my own. Regular writing in front of a screen was no longer a priority. As I worked for a cause I believed in, my heart felt full and stopped searching for more. As my nervous system got used to a regular monthly income for the first time in years, I found myself stepping among the mountains with the lightness that was always the goal. I said no to podcast guests. I left my next chapters about resilience unwritten. In the moments I felt like writing, I was drawn to working on a playful fiction book. In this Substack, which I had started to explore the themes of resilience I had been so deep in for a while, my last writing shared was simply about a trip in the hills. I took away any paywalls.

I know that I will still have tough times. I still feel the grief, it doesn’t leave. As I drove through Glencoe last month, a song we played at my brother’s funeral came on my playlist, and I cried into the aching loneliness it brought. I still sit on the hills sometimes and cry to the children and life I didn’t have. I know the darkness will come, but I also know it isn’t a place I want to stay. I thought staying in the darkness was the messy, crying, helplessness part. But now I think there are other ways to stay there. And that, for me, is by the constant noise of talking about it, of being known by it, and revisiting it over and over again, even if that comes from a place of helping others.

I admire people who turn their darkness into a light shining to others, whether that is through speaking, writing or coaching. However, I give myself permission not to do that. There are other ways to show the strength of overcoming. And for me, overcoming is moving so far past it, it isn’t part of what I do anymore, and where I am going.

I still believe I will finish my book about resilience one day. I will still share new episodes of my podcast and plan to revisit the old ones sometime when I feel drawn back to that book. But I will also write other books, I will have other conversations, careers, and a richer, more diverse life than simply focusing on the walled path of tough times. And maybe that says more about resilience than any keynote to C-suits ever could.

May you find the lightness if you are looking for it. And find permission not to have to turn every sorrow into a joy or service. Sometimes it might be that we need to turn our backs on that sorrow and walk a whole new path to find the joy. And how beautiful that can be.

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