Resilience
Overview
Resilience is the ability to recover and adapt when you face adversity, trauma, stress, or threats. In physics, the word describes the property of an object that returns to its original shape after an outside force deforms it. In psychology, it drew attention through research on children who developed in healthy ways despite growing up in difficult environments.
Resilience isn't "the strength to never get hurt." It's "the ability to recover," which assumes you will get hurt. It doesn't mean staying unbothered when something bad happens. It means that even if something bad happens and you feel down, you can bounce back from it.
Running a question box and resilience
As you run a question box over a long time, you may run into bad experiences: malicious questions, off-target criticism, invasions of privacy, backlash.
Some people who have kept a question box going for a long time have high resilience. When a mean question comes in, they can let it slide: "These things happen." When there's backlash, they know "it'll die down with time." This isn't insensitivity. It's the ability to recover, backed by experience. Even people who felt down after their first mean question may bounce back faster as they gain experience.
Building resilience
Part of resilience can be built up later on. The American Psychological Association lists connecting with people as one way to build resilience.
There are things you can put into practice in the context of a question box. First, don't keep it all to yourself. After getting a mean question, talking to a friend you trust helps you recover. Second, remember your past successes. Having gotten through mean questions before can encourage you this time too. Third, don't aim for perfection. You don't have to handle every question perfectly. Being able to forgive yourself and say "this is good enough for today" is also part of resilience.