Once again, I feel compelled to share and amplify an essay, this one by Shaza Abu Dayah, the Voice of Truth, about the myth of resilience. She describes herself on her Substack account as a “Gazan, Psychologist, Journalist,Writer. Sharing my poetry, reporting on life during genocide, Palestinian History, the Occupation, and more.” Please consider a paid subscription to support Shaza and her family. As she notes, “Your paid subscription aids in my survival.”
This is something I think about from time to time in the context of the ongoing Israeli-sponsored genocide in Gaza:
In the End
We are not heroes. We are people. We love and fear and tire and rage and break and rise, and then break again. Our rising does not make the first breaking acceptable, and our endurance is not proof that we can bear more.
If you truly wish to honor us, do not tell us we are strong; make strength unnecessary. Then, and only then, we will set down this shoe we have not taken off in so long, and walk barefoot on the land we know, and be at last what we were before they told us what they told us: ordinary people who want ordinary lives.
It reminds me of the French-Romanian Jewish poet, critic, and existentialist philosopher and his poem Preface in Prose that I wrote about in this 2026 essay. Fondane was murdered in Auschwitz 82 years ago on 2 October.
MAA
There is a sentence we are told often these days. It is said with love, admiration, and sincerity, and yet it leaves something in the heart that feels like a sting: “You are heroes.”
We smile when we hear it. I know that smile well. It comes out on its own whenever someone praises us for what hurts us, and it means two things at once: thank you, and I wish you had asked me how I was.
I have long asked myself why a word so beautiful should hurt. I think I have found the answer, or part of it.
A Word Born to Protect Us
I do not deny that resilience has a noble history in our language. It is a word born to say that we are staying, that we are not alone, and that the land we stand on will not be surrendered easily. I have seen with my own eyes how people cling to it as a drowning person clings to a plank, and without it they would have sunk. I respect it as I respect everything that protected my people when nothing else did.
But I have also learned that the word has two faces. The resilience I choose is strength; the resilience demanded of me is a burden. Between the two lies a difference that everyone who has ever sat in a therapy room knows: the difference between one who carries a load because he decided to, and one who carries it because he is not allowed to set it down.
The Shoe That Never Comes Off
Sometimes I imagine resilience as a shoe we were made to wear and then forgotten to be allowed to take off. We walk in it every day and grow accustomed to its tightness, and then passersby say: “Look how well they walk!” And no one notices the bleeding feet.
This is how resilience turns from a feeling into a performance. A child learns to hide his fear because his family wants him to be “a man.” A mother learns to fight back her tears because those around her expect her to be “solid.” A young man learns to say “I’m fine” because any other answer would disappoint what is expected of him. And little by little we step into a play whose script we did not write, and from whose stage we are not free to leave.
Collapse Is Not a Fall
In my work as a psychologist, the first thing I try to give the person sitting in front of me is something rare these days: permission to be weak. I tell them that this place does not require them to be strong, that they may cry or scream or stay silent, and that they may say they are tired of everything, even of life itself, without anyone panicking.
I have learned that this permission alone opens doors that ten sessions cannot. When a person is allowed to be weak, shoulders that have not loosened in months relax, and the tears begin, not because he has collapsed, but because he has finally found a place that holds him whole. I understand then that collapse is sometimes not a fall, but the first thing that happens when a person allows himself to be human.
Comfortable Admiration
But the most dangerous thing about the myth of resilience is not what it does to us. It is what it does to those who watch us.
Whoever sees me as a hero is released from his duty toward me. If I can endure it, why should he intervene? If I am steadfast, why should he rescue me? And so admiration, a noble feeling in its origin, becomes a quiet excuse for inaction. It seems the world likes to applaud those who endure more than it likes to prevent what makes the enduring necessary.
This is what I call “comfortable admiration”: we see the suffering of others and call it heroism, and so we feel at ease. We keep a good feeling about ourselves because we are admirers, and then we return to our lives. And the hero in this story stays where he is, applauded and unprotected.
What Goes Unsaid
No one tells us that heroism is usually demanded in brief, exceptional moments, after which the hero returns to his life. We have no exception to return from. Heroism has become an imposed way of living, the exception has become the rule, and what was meant to be a moment has become a lifetime.
And no one tells us that a person pushed to the edge of his capacity may grow angry, may grow harsh, may withdraw, may be afraid. This is not a flaw or a moral weakness; it is human nature. I fear the illusion of heroism may lead us to judge ourselves harshly when we fail to be what is expected of us, adding to our pain a shame we do not deserve.
The Children Who Learn the Role
I ache more when I think of the children. Resilience entered their vocabulary early, and with it came the feeling that they must be “strong” to please those around them. How many small children have I seen comfort their mothers, reassure their siblings, and carry what only adults should carry, and how many times have I wondered: where did the child go in all of this?
The greatest thing the myth of resilience can do is steal from children their right to be weak. A child who is not allowed to be afraid does not learn to deal with fear; he learns to hide it. And what we hide grows with us in the dark.
And I, Too
I will not write these lines without admitting something: that I am not outside this myth. I enter the therapy room every day with a steady face and a calm voice, and I tell those I sit with that what they feel is understandable and that they are not alone, while I tremble inside as they do. And when I am told “you are strong,” I smile and say to myself: if only you knew.
We have all become, the therapist and the patient, the mother and the child, performers of the strong one so that each of us may protect the other, and each of us suffers in the dark because no one asked how we were.
What I Ask
So what do I ask?
I do not ask people to stop respecting us; respect is a right. Nor do I ask them to deny what they have seen in us of cohesion, solidarity, and a beautiful stubbornness in the face of circumstance; all of that is real. I ask for something simpler and harder: that they see both sides together. That they say “how astonishing what you endure” and, at the same time, “how unacceptable that you must endure it.”
And I ask that they ask us: how are you, really? And then be patient with the answer, however long it takes and however much it differs from what they expect. For true compassion is not applause; it is listening.
In the End
We are not heroes. We are people. We love and fear and tire and rage and break and rise, and then break again. Our rising does not make the first breaking acceptable, and our endurance is not proof that we can bear more.
If you truly wish to honor us, do not tell us we are strong; make strength unnecessary. Then, and only then, we will set down this shoe we have not taken off in so long, and walk barefoot on the land we know, and be at last what we were before they told us what they told us: ordinary people who want ordinary lives.
