The word ‘resilience’ tends to evoke some epic image – a small sailboat braving the waves, an exhausted athlete collecting himself before the final sprint, a firefighter persevering through fire and smoke to save a child. In my case, resilience is closer associated with the dim blue light of a laptop screen, at 1am on a Tuesday evening; my eyes are sore, and I can feel the metronome of a light migraine somewhere behind my ears. What is adversity? Again, something disastrous, life-changing, right? Well, for me it was an empty inbox. Refresh. Still empty. Refresh again, hoping that the reassuring jingle would take away my anxiety. Still empty.

It was now twelve days since I had sent off requests to nearly 30 youth clubs in the most deprived areas of London, hoping to secure a few focus groups where I would talk to children about meals at their schools. Ten days, one reply. Even there, logistical problems with sending out consent forms were looking like a roadblock that my one-man legal department couldn’t overcome. It was, to say the least, underwhelming. According to the timeline I charted for myself, ten days was the most I could spend on waiting for the replies; I was two days behind. I needed to make a decision, one I kept putting off for as long as I could – I could throw in the towel, give up, admit to the Laidlaw management that everything fell through and see my work go to waste, or I could do something. And, that night, I decided to… postpone the decision once more until the morning. Yeah, what else did you expect?

In the morning however, the picture in my head was clear – I wanted to make the situation work. This was my final project under the scholarship, and I couldn’t go out quietly – I had to put up some sort of a fight. Letting go of the work I had done on getting the focus groups sorted wasn’t easy, but I had to drop the ballast if I were to re-surface. Immediately, I took action; I knew there was some other campaign at Bite Back, the organisation I was working with, that I could at least help with, if not organise. After an afternoon of scraping as much information from memos and strategy documents as I could, I had a reasonable list of options. A meeting with my manager was scheduled promptly, and I was soon presenting my options over Zoom. At first, the reception of my ideas was not raving – after all, it’s not exactly easy to just parachute an additional person into established teams without having them be redundant. But, as I kept making suggestions, my manager had an idea. There was a project, one I was not aware of, carried out by a younger intern who could use my help. While the focus was different – researching and gathering opinions on the racial stereotypes in junk food advertising – the elements that went into it (finding interviewees, scheduling, looking for available data) were similar to what I had already done. This was, by far, the best possible option – not only was I still in action, but I also got to carry over some of the work I had resigned to losing. Additionally, there was now an element of mentorship, as I was guiding the intern so that they could carry on after I depart.

Sadly, I did not get to see this second project through to its end – this was the price I had to pay. It was, however, better than the alternative of failing and doing nothing, one that seemed inevitable at one moment. Was that change-over, that impromptu switch between the projects, something life-changing? Not necessarily. But it was a show of resilience nonetheless.