Tougher Than Resiliency
The phonetic dance of these two words says a lot about us.
I was thinking, for no particular reason, of how I would describe myself in a few words, maybe even one word. A lot of words came up, and the feelings they evoked were of someone like me, but didn’t really strike through to my core. Then I was looking over an old text message:
Girl, you’re tough.
Am I really, though? And then I thought about that word that seems to have much more cultural cachet than tough, resilient. Back in a previous life, I first came across it in systems architecture.
It took me a while to grasp the difference between redundant architecture and resilient architecture, but once I did I graduated to making my architectural creations beautiful works of art, where they might have just been somewhere between pretty good and excellent previously.
I feel that same duality between tough, and resilient, but in a much different way. Resiliency, when we are not talking about technology, seems to occupy some odd life-coachy area of our vernacular. Even the way the word sounds feels like tough walked into a day spa, and laid back as a seaweed facial and other bougie expressions of largesse were carried out.
Tough can also be used in a way that resilient can’t. You can say you’ve had it tough, while I’ve never heard anyone say they had it resilient. That extra layer of duality is really fascinating to me. Being tough is good, having it tough is bad. Does one lead to the other?
Being around Persons Of Importance a lot now has driven home a few things to me. I should have left home at 18. I would have saved myself from a few extra years of abuse, and maybe I would have been a member of the Paypal Mafia. Also that it was mostly coming from modest means, to put it mildly, that generated this automatic response to putting certain people on pedestals (that I am now thankfully watching fade into nothingness).
All that said, if I was born into wealth, who would I be? More importantly, what would I be? I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I would definitely not be tough, or resilient. Maybe I would have transitioned as soon as I ‘knew’, maybe not. I’m exceptionally proud of both who and what I am. I think perhaps that one or two tough things too many happened to me, but I’m even a little grateful for that.
Tough sounds almost identical to rough, another word that I think about sometimes. I’ve often been referred to as a ‘diamond in the rough’, and that’s certainly how I’ve felt much of the time. Objectively, a special human being that shines when given the chance. Sometimes given that chance, and sometimes covered in sand as the parade of cubic zirconias do their thing.
As a proto-alt girl I’m really okay with both tough and rough, but resiliency has a certain allure to it. Its sing-song pronunciation, the ubiquity of it on the other side of the class divide. A tweet I made illustrates this particular duality pretty well:
I’ve manifested going to a mansion party at the end of this month, and that’s certainly one form of opulence. I often wonder, and ask myself, if that’s really the end goal here. Does the top floor of my personal interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy have a mansion, which I will enter wearing a Versace dress, where I will sip white wine with NFT collectors?
Or, will it be some form of anarchist collective that I walk into, dressed in punk chic and sporting about 5 or 6 more tattoos than I have now? Right now, that’s far more appealing to me (as long as I have a few invites to opulent mansions here and there). Will it always be that way, though? Is there just some great continuum between tough and resilient, and I’m just slowly making my way down it?
Beyond the more academic phonetic issues I’ve raised here, the question that ultimately should be answered is what I am now, and what I want to be. The peak of the past phase of my life is perhaps best described as ‘tough, and sometimes just this side of rough’.
In the future? I think some aspects of ourselves can never be undone. I’m always going to be tough, and perhaps my heart will always be rough. I would, though, like to be able to play a resilient woman on the weekends and at parties. I think I’d also like to be able to tell who is doing the same, and give those secretly tough women a wink and a wry smile from time to time.