This book was well-researched, but that's all it was: research. With one primary personal story occasionally harkened back to. I kept reading—forcing myself to keep reading—because I was waiting for the author to start to bring it all together, synthesize the research they were presenting, draw some conclusions or ask big questions that make the reader think. It also was in dire need of an editor, with many moments where the wrong word or tense of word was used. I really really wanted to love this book. Goodness. I tried. And I do appreciate the sheer amount of research that went into it. But I am not picking up a book like this to read regurgitated research. I'm picking it up to be challenged to think in different ways. Maybe I just was already familiar with all of the themes of the research, so nothing was new, insightful, or felt challenging? I'm not sure. But yeah. It was a miss for me. 

"No one is resilient alone at all times and in all contexts, and none should feel they must be. Yet disconnection, hierarchy, and alienation from one another and the world are the premises of our conventional resilience. Our cultural script for resilience, therefore, is part of the same systems and worldviews that require us to be so resilient to begin with."

Read this book. A sharp, insightful, deeply kind work that both tears toxic narratives of self-sufficiency down to the studs and offers us a bold, hopeful, and more adaptive model of resiliency as a collective and antihierarchical project.

In March of 2024, I broke my arm. It was awful. It defined much of my year. But I am profoundly grateful both for the social and structural factors that allowed me to recover and for the clarity and insight I gained (about my self, care, and capitalism amongst other topics) from the experience. I'm grateful too to end this year with a book that so perfectly articulates it all.