What The Long Dark can teach us about resilience

Hi there,

today marks the second day of Pride Month. As I’m sitting down to write this column I can’t help but wonder about all those out there who have not had the courage to be fully themselves in every setting yet. It is a special kind of suffering to continuously grind away those parts of yourself you or others deem unworthy or wrong, and it takes a special kind of resilience to wake up every morning despite it all and keep going. 

I know this because I’ve been there. 

Sometimes, when I’m quite stressed and I don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to engage with complex media, I like to play The Long Dark (by the way, I've added a new info box on the game of the week down below).

In this survival game set in the Canadian wilderness, you spend the whole game alone, foraging nature and abandoned houses, looking for shelter, warmer clothes, food, and supplies. On its harder difficulty settings I often don’t even last a day before my character freezes to death. On its easier difficulties I wander around the game’s world, keep my distance from wolves and bears, and map my surroundings with charcoal and paper. 

My character hardly speaks as there is no story in the survival mode of the game, and so I find myself walking through snow, wind, and weather; day after day after day, in silence and solitude, trying to survive. I’m being resilient.

Isn’t it pretty?

But what is resilience, really? The word gets often thrown around, and sometimes people look for this adjective when hiring people (much to my dismay, more on that later). I’ve seen it being mistaken for agility, confused with stress resistance, or taken as a (false) synonym for persistence.  

Dictionary Merriam-Webster shares two definitions of resilience: 

1: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress

2: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

Something bad happens, yet you recover. That is resilience to me. The important part here is “recover”. You recover from stress, an injury, or suffering. You don’t have to recover from ordinary life (which is also why companies looking for resilience in candidates are basically putting their unhealthy culture on blast, because why would you need resilience at work otherwise, or, also possible of course, they don’t care as much for word definitions as I do).

In The Long Dark, I recover from freezing cold, food poisoning, or animal attacks, depending on what kind of misfortune I encounter in each particular game. Despite it all, I move on. If my character dies, I often create a new one, starting another game immediately after losing the previous one. Each night I add to my survival statistics is a small win. 

The starting screen of my current game.

And now the ugly truth: Sometimes real life feels like this as well. Adding a simple night to your life is a win. For some, work life feels like this. For some, love life. For some, family life. Misery has countless shapes. 

On Great Bear Island, the setting of The Long Dark, I once finally gathered enough courage and curiosity to venture beyond the chartered, comfortable location of a small town. To seek a new area, my character had to climb down a steep cliff. Down below, I hadn’t even walked for 5 minutes when a big moose charged at me, broke several of my ribs, and thus nearly killed me. I couldn’t climb back up and had to wait five days in order to heal enough to attempt it. Without having brought enough supplies and proper shelter, my character first hungered, then started freezing, and finally died in a small dark cave. 

I am currently on another playthrough and found myself in the same town again. My character is gathering supplies, but I realize I’m getting bored. I want to venture down the cliff again (this time with a rifle and a couple of bullets for the moose), yet the memory of my previous unfortunate end makes me dread the attempt. I’m tired of suffering to get to the good stuff. I’m tired of being resilient. 

Climbed up to the top just to look down.

I have a torn relationship to resilience. It is an admirable ability but not something most people consciously train (though probably more of us should). For many people that I’ve met over the years who suffered abusive relationships (at home, work, or wherever), resilience was a result of mere survival. It’s like getting charged by a moose and then receiving a nice little award for it. Congratulations, you’re resilient now! But like… why can’t we get to the celebrations without the hurt? 

Which brings me back to Pride, a month dedicated to celebrating the good stuff, and the fight it tooks and still takes to get there. Aka the month of celebrating resilience of gay, lesbian, bi, trans, intersex, asexual, and all other forms of queer people worldwide.  

Whether you’re building your resilience by seeking out new experiences or by trying to survive the familiar ones, know that I see you. I know our struggle. And I also know: We will try again. Not because we have to. But because we want to. And what enables us to make that choice is… resilience.

Happy Pride, people. <3

Write to you soon,

Mina

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Game of the week: The Long Dark
Genre: Survival, Adventure
Gameplay: The Long Dark is a survival game which takes place in the frigid Canadian wilderness, and is played from a first-person perspective. The gameplay is stated by the developers to be a "survival simulation that accounts for body temperature, caloric intake, hunger/thirst, fatigue, wind-chill, wildlife, and a host of other environmental factors."

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