Finding a new normal: a scholarly personal narrative on resilience during the covid-19 pandemic

This thesis is a Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) that explores the study of resilience and resilience theory through anecdotes. Through a personal anecdote, the theme of resilience will be introduced followed by a general overview of the study of resilience from a historical and multidisciplinary perspective. After an in depth look at the resilience and the resilience theory, I will share my personal experiences at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with a reflection of my own experiences I will examine the principles of resilience theory as a structural guide for general application. My goal in writing this thesis is to, first, demonstrate the relevant nature of the resilience theory in not only strenuous circumstances, but also everyday life. Second, I hope to validate the struggles and difficulties associated with staying physically active in the face of individual, community, and global change.

ABSTRACT This thesis is a Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) that explores the study of resilience and resilience theory through anecdotes. Through a personal anecdote, the theme of resilience will be introduced followed by a general overview of the study of resilience from a historical and multidisciplinary perspective. After an in depth look at the resilience and the resilience theory, I will share my personal experiences at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with a reflection of my own experiences I will examine the principles of resilience theory as a structural guide for general application. My goal in writing this thesis is to, first, demonstrate the relevant nature of the resilience theory in not only strenuous circumstances, but also everyday life. Second, I hope to validate the struggles and difficulties associated with staying physically active in the face of individual, community, and global change. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH RESILIENCE 1 INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY PERSONAL NARRATIVES 5 THE STUDY OF RESILIENCE 7 HOMEOSTASIS 13 DISRUPTION 15 REINTEGRATION 18 REFLECTION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 20 REFERENCE LIST 23 iii 1 MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH RESILIENCE Resilience has been a recurring theme throughout my life, but I never truly realized it until now. As I was thinking about how resilience fit into my life, I immediately thought back to the time I experienced a life changing injury. I had spent a large portion of my life competitively figure skating, and while I knew I was never going to the Olympics, I had one goal: to reach the highest level in figure skating by testing out. The term “test out” is used to describe when a skater has passed all levels and has reached the highest level known as the “senior” level. In figure skating there are eight levels that a skater can advance through. In order to advance to the next level, a skater must take a test which involves performing a program in front of a panel of judges. When a skater has “tested out” they have passed all tests and have reached the senior level. The protocol for testing is very similar to competition but rather than competing against other skaters you’re competing against yourself. A majority of skaters do not end up being professionals, but testing out is a way to prove your hard work and dedication to the sport. It can also open up some opportunities even after competing. I made it a goal to test out before I graduated high school because it was a way I could find closure with the sport and walk away knowing my hard work paid off. I knew I wanted a fresh start in college and didn’t want to be labeled as “the figure skater” like I was in high school. I had lived many years full of enriching experiences, but I was ready to move on. The first time I took my senior level test was in the winter of my junior year of high school, and despite the fact of landing all the jumps during my program, I did not pass due to lack of artistry. In the following months I worked to improve my artistry, and by the 2 summer I was ready to take the test for a second time. I was only a few weeks out from the test when I sprained my medial collateral ligament (MCL) on the ice. The doctor considered me lucky because it wasn’t a full tear, but in my eyes, it was just another setback from taking the test. After four weeks off the ice, I started training harder than ever to pass the senior level test. In the meanwhile, also preparing to head into my final year of high school. Throughout the first half of my last year in high school, I continued to work towards the goal of passing my senior level test with the determination to pass it before I went to college. I can still clearly remember the specific day of my injury about halfway through my senior year of high school, and I think about it as if I was reliving the experience. After a normal school day, I head to the rink like usual. I’m in a lesson running my program back-to-back-to-back. In the midst of one of my program run-throughs I come up on a jump that I’ve performed nearly thousands of times and somehow land on the wrong foot and roll my ankle out. I sit on the ice hitting it in pain and eventually end up laying on the cold surface. The pain was mostly in my ankle but shot up through my lower leg. The memory of the pain is fuzzy, yet my surroundings are so clear. After my brain was able to catch up enough to realize I was seriously injured I let out a cry screaming “I won’t be able to take my test!” I was carried out on a stretcher by emergency personnel and later found out I broke all the ligaments in my ankle and fractured my fibula. I needed surgery within the week. Broken ankles rarely occur in skating because the boots provide enough support to prevent any breaks, but it was the way my ankle had rolled that caused a rare injury. Typically, during ankle strains and breaks the foot rolls in and the lateral side of the ankle 3 is sprained. This time, I not only landed on the wrong foot, but also rolled it to the outside where the force had gone through my ankle and up the lower leg. Because of the force pattern, I ended up tearing all the ligaments in my ankle that connected my foot to my lower leg. What I had thought would be a triumphant senior year had turned into the worst year of my life. After surgery where I had a screw drilled into the lateral side of my ankle, I was on crutches for 8 weeks, and then another 4 or so weeks until I could get the hardware out. My entire plan to pass my senior level test had been thrown off course throwing my emotions into a tailspin. On top of that, I soon had to make the decision of where to attend college. Originally, I was set on going out of state for college since there was nothing keeping me in Salt Lake after passing my skating test. Now, I had to rethink everything. Would I regret not having finished my one last test after all these years of commitment to skating? In a high school where my peers went on to attend Stanford, Duke, and the like would I be selling myself short by staying in Utah? These were some of the most difficult questions I had ever asked myself, and I didn’t have a lot of time to answer them. I decided to stay in Utah because I had made a commitment to passing my senior test, and I wasn’t ready to leave the sport that I loved so much with possible regret and trauma. It took 8 months of not only physical, but mainly psychological and mental training for me to finally pass my senior level test. This was the first memory that came to my mind regarding resilience because it was such a life changing process, and I just couldn’t ignore it. At the time my knowledge of resilience was limited, but I knew that resilience had something to do with my recovery. This is one of my main motivators for exploring this topic, so I could have a better 4 understanding of my own experiences. I had made a huge comeback and not only did I recover to the level I was at before the injury, but I also surpassed that level to ultimately pass my senior level test. By most people’s definition, I was “resilient”; however, I’ve come to realize that resilience is much more complex than someone’s ability to bounce back. Resilience isn’t merely the act of achieving after encountering hardship. It was not necessarily the act of passing my test that made me resilient, but also the mental and physical process I went through to overcome my injury. Resilience goes beyond our actions, and into our qualities, characteristics, and values to build a long-lasting system that helps us adapt to and overcome future adversities. I wanted to share this memory as a way of introducing the concept of resilience. I will continue to share my experiences with the resiliency process through another lifechanging event: The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. My experience during the COVID19 pandemic will focus on exercise behavior through the lens of resiliency. 5 INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY PERSONAL NARRATIVES There is a lot to be learned from self-reflection and the process involved in writing a personal narrative. While personal narratives are not typically thought of as scholarly writing in a traditional sense, scholarly personal narrative (SPN) writing requires an understanding of research and how it can be used to support introspection. The SPN format is emerging as a new form of scholarly writing; Nash (2011) provides a guide for writing scholarly personal narratives which I will be using to develop and display my story in this scholarly manuscript. SPN writing allows the author to take creative liberty with the writing. There are some general guidelines Nash (2011) lists that help readers and writers identify with a scholarly narrative piece: clear themes, personal stories/anecdotes, generalizability, authentic citations, taking risks from traditional formats, realizing that you have a personal story worth telling, and strive for academic rigor. SPN writing, according to Nash (2011), has four different components of research: pre-search, me-search, research, and we-search. Pre-search is a term used to describe any internal or external work that was done prior to any writing and is a broad term that includes but is not limited to free writing, brainstorming ideas and concepts, and self – reflecting. The Me-search phase begins when the writer realizes they have a story worth telling. The research phase is similar to traditional where the author brings in outside sources to build a case. We-search is a term used by Nash (2011) to call attention to the universalizability of a scholarly personal narrative to reach beyond the writer’s personal experience. Ensuring that any SPN can be generalized beyond the writer is what makes SPN unique among traditional non-scholarly personal narratives. These different research phases are 6 guidelines for building the foundation of a scholarly personal narrative, but the writer is not required to move through the phases in specific order. Because of the amount of freedom granted to the SPN writer, SPN manuscripts are unique from each other. The ultimate goal of a scholarly personal narrative is to showcase the writer's story in a way that allows the themes to reach beyond the writer itself. 7 THE STUDY OF RESILIENCE Most of us know resilience to be the ability for an individual to “bounce back” from adversity; however, this explanation of the concept is still left undefined with a lot of unanswered questions. How does one become resilient? What makes someone resilient? Is resilience an outcome or is it a trait? These are just some of the questions that research on resilience has aimed to answer with current research still trying to fill in the gaps on this elusive concept. Because the study of resilience has such a wide scope, research has expanded across multiple disciplines with each discipline incorporating different aspects of the theoretical approach into their own definition. In the discipline of psychology, where the research on resilience started, the concepts of adversity and positive adaptation must be present for an individual to demonstrate resilience (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013). As research began to grow each discipline began to formulate new concepts of resilience within their scope. Work by Berkes and Ross (2013) supports this idea by taking an integrated approach in interpreting community resilience to inform new research by using commonalities between literature on social-ecological systems and psychology and mental health. After conducting their review, Berkes and Ross concluded that each strand of literature benefits communities in different ways with the social-ecological approach being most appropriate for communities tied to place and resource, and the psychology and mental health strand benefiting communities that are independent of resources and do not require analysis of natural disasters. Over time the study of resilience has evolved to shed light on the theoretical constructs of resilience and its process. Early research on resilience originating in the field 8 of psychology focused on social determinants of health of individuals. Overtime the domain has progressed from individual to communities and general health (Fleming & Ledogar, 2008). No single universal definition of the term resilience exists, but there have been common themes identified throughout different disciplines that all link back to the concept of resilience. For example, in a panel discussion held by the International Society for Traumatic Stress, multiple researchers had slightly different definitions of resilience with all agreeing that the concept included aspects of healthy, adaptive, or positive functioning following adversity (Southwick et al. 2014). Initially, resilience was thought of as a trait or a characteristic, but research has grown to include the definition of resilience as a process that changes over time (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013). This expansion in definition can be seen in a recent review of 16 metasyntheses conducted by Ungar (2018) where 7 different principles were identified that describe models of resilience across a variety of systems. With biological, psychological, social, cultural, economic, and legal systems included, the 7 principles identified include: (1) resilience takes place in contexts of adversity; (2) resilience is a process; (3) a system experiences tradeoffs when there is resilience; (4) resilient systems are open, dynamic, and complex; (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity; (6) resilient systems exhibit experimentation and learning; and (7) resilient systems include diversity, redundancy, and participation. Although the systems that Ungar (2018) assesses are widespread, the analysis does conclude resilience is a process, and within the process are sub-processes that play a part in making the system more robust when faced with adversity. These sub-processes include persistence, resistance, recovery, adaptation, and transformation. These more 9 recent findings from Ungar (2018) identifying specific characteristics that make systems better at handling stress have practical implications for improving systems by targeting those sub-processes. While the concept of resilience has been around for decades, and most of us intuitively know what it means to be “resilient,” research has expanded over the years to bring more clarity to the concept, and more specifically the process of resilience. With the establishment of resilience as both a trait and a process, there is limited research on the details of resilience as a process. This is most likely because resilience as a process is difficult to measure. A metatheory described by Richardson (2002) presents the resilience and resiliency construct as three waves. The first wave centers around the study of resilient qualities and how these qualities arise. The second wave describes the research involved with the actual resilience process and examines reintegrative processes after a disruption. The third wave is about innate resilience and describes the identification of motivational forces and ways to cultivate them for use in the future. The second wave of Richardson’s (2002) model aims to answer the question “how are resilient qualities acquired?” The answer to this question can be represented in a model Richardson (2002) proposed describing the process of an individual moving through phases of biopsychospiritual homeostasis, life interactions, disruptions, and a readiness to reintegrate with a choice to reintegrate resiliently, back to homeostasis, or with loss. The term “disruption” is used to describe any change in an individual’s homeostasis that results in either positive or negative outcomes. A disruption can take many forms; it can be a change to the surrounding environment or a newly acquired piece of information. It could also be planned or unplanned, and the perceived seriousness of a disruption depends on an 10 individual’s resilient qualities and how they have reintegrated in the past and can be a predictor for future reintegration processes. The second wave describes the details of the resilience process. The resilience process begins with a state of biopsychospiritual homeostasis which Richardson (2002) defines as “a point in time when one has adapted physically, mentally, and spiritually to a set of circumstances whether good or bad” (311). The realms of biology, psychology, and spirit are extensively interconnected with various driving forces behind them. The term biopsychospiritual homeostasis can also be thought of as a baseline. Once homeostasis is disrupted, which can happen routinely, an individual can either reintegrate resiliently, reintegrate back to biopsychospiritual homeostasis, reintegrate with loss, or reintegrate with dysfunction. Resilient reintegration involves experiencing growth following a disruption and results in the strengthening of resilient qualities. Ideally, the outcome of reintegrating resiliently is growth, knowledge, and self-understanding. Reintegration back to homeostasis means returning to biopsychospiritual homeostasis resulting in no growth. This type of reintegration may occur when an individual rejects any opportunity for growth. Reintegration with loss occurs when there is loss of a motivating factor trying to cope. In this case resilient qualities are not strengthened. Lastly, reintegration with dysfunction occurs when an individual turns to substances and/or sabotaging behavior to cope with a disruption. This may occur because the individual does not have the ability for introspection and professional help should be sought out. Despite the type of reintegration an individual goes through, eventually a biopsychospiritual homeostasis is found again and the process is repeated. 11 Richardson points out that this linear model of the resilience process does not account for the multifaceted characteristics of life’s components. This model only accounts for a particular disruption at a time, when in reality there may be multiple disruptions of different magnitudes occurring simultaneously. The resiliency process can last seconds or span years depending on the type of disruption. For example, it may take someone only seconds to reintegrate from an intrusive thought, but it may take years to reintegrate from a death of a loved one. Furthermore, the resiliency process is not terminal and allows for continuing growth even beyond our initial reactions to a disruption. Following a significant disruption, and individual who initially reintegrated with loss has potential to reintegrate resiliently following another disruption such as therapy. Although the resiliency process may be easier understood as an individual process, its application reaches multiple spheres of life such as communities, families, and schools. The third wave explores the details and possibilities of different sources of energy required to reintegrate resiliently. To reintegrate resiliently requires greater energy, and according to Richardson (2002) and the resilience theory, the energy required is a “spiritual source or innate resilience” (p. 313). In the third wave, Richardson suggests various possibilities for which this spiritual source might be: quanta, chi, soul etc. Whatever the spiritual source is that an individual pull from, the entire premise of the resilience theory is that there is “a force within everyone that drives them to seek self-actualization, altruism, wisdom, and harmony with a spiritual source of strength” (p. 313). This concept is the core of the resilience theory and identifying the source of this energy can increase the likelihood of reintegrating resiliently in the future. 12 There are no definite predictors that ensure resilient reintegration. Moving towards resilient reintegration requires a desire for growth and a willingness to engage in introspection as a way of connecting with the individual’s resilient qualities. Engaging in introspection requires energy, and we pull from a spiritual source to get this energy. After disruption occurs, there is a period of time between the disruption and reintegration where introspection is critical. It is at this time that we pull from our energy source to engage in introspection leading to self-discovery and self-exploration. Introspection may strengthen resilient qualities and strengthen the energy that drives us further towards resilient reintegration. If an individual is not willing or does not take time for introspection they will not pulling from their energy source will likely reintegrate with loss. With each disruption there is a chance for introspection with the opportunity to reintegrate resiliently. Exploring our own spiritual source may help increase self-awareness and strengthen our resilient qualities that protect us from adverse disruptions. Disruptions, whether day-to-day or unexpected are necessary and provide the opportunity for growth. Without disruptions, we would be in a constant state of biopsychospiritual homeostasis where there is no demand for growth. When we experience a disruption, we pull from a spiritual source that may help us reintegrate resiliently. Through the constant process of experiencing disruptions and going through reintegration we have the potential to develop and nurture our resilient qualities that have a protective measure against future disruptions. 13 HOMEOSTASIS Like so many others, I had a routine before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States. My routine fully revolved around my school schedule, and I fully adapted to my circumstances of the time; you could even say I was in a state of biopsychospiritual homeostasis. Having a routine helped me hold this homeostasis state. I drove to campus in the morning, went to my classes throughout the day, and returned home after the day was over. During my breaks I would exercise at the student gym and study at the library. Nearly every day looked the same, and I always found comfort in routine. In my large lecture classes, I would think strategically about where to sit with the classroom filled with rows of students. Even though social distancing was not yet expected, the idea of someone standing or sitting too close made me uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the fact that I was on campus with other people who had their own routines made me feel less lonely. In February 2020 I got my first job as a Medical Assistant working at the University of Utah Hospital in an outpatient clinic. This was a disruption to my homeostasis, and I had to create a new routine to incorporate my work schedule into my school schedule. While my physical homeostasis was not changed by this disruption, my mental/emotional and spiritual states where altered. This new job, although a positive change, was still a disruption to my previously “normal” routine. I had never before had to balance school with a serious job like this one. Initially, I struggled because this was a challenge I had never faced before. After a few weeks, I finally adapted to the change. More specifically, 14 I believe I reintegrated resiliently, and I had reached a new homeostasis in which I fully adapted to my new set of circumstances which, in this case, were positive. This is just one example of the resilience process in my story, and it’s important to keep in mind that the resilience process is occurring numerous times throughout my experience up until this point in the pandemic. In this specific case, starting my new job as a Medical Assistant was a positive disruption. It took me a few weeks to find my way and reintegrate resiliently where the result was increased self-knowledge and growth. I had not faced a challenge like this one before, but I used familiar tools and strategies to help navigate a new schedule and routine. Ultimately, I was able to successfully integrate my new job into my life with the outcome of strengthening my organizational and communication skills. This successful resilient reintegration also strengthened my ability to be adaptable and flexible. Because disruptions like this are common there is often no resulting change in homeostasis even though there still was a resilience process. 15 DISRUPTION Not even a month into having my new job where I had just barely adapted to the circumstances, I was faced with another disruption, and this time a global one: COVID-19. In the first days during the second week of March 2020 Utah reported its first case of COVID-19. This week also just so happened to be spring break for the University of Utah and quickly became a turning point for the lockdown restrictions. It was during this week that the surrounding world began to go into lockdown where gyms, restaurants, and shops began to close. With each progressing day, the idea of social distancing became more relevant in our daily routines. As I watched the world shut down, I became increasingly afraid of the coming changes to my world. Within a few days I watched as universities across the nation were forced to decide whether to continue in-person classes or move online knowing very well that my own university was faced with the same dilemma. Midway into the week, I eagerly waited for the start of an online press conference where the president of University of Utah was going to announce the its big decision. The decision was final: we were moving online. This prompt decision forced professors to swiftly transition their curriculum to an online format for the foreseeable future. I became flooded with different emotions. It was happening; my world was shutting down too, and the ground I previously stood on completely crumbled leaving me with no stability. Everything I knew had changed within a matter of days. On one hand, I knew moving online was the right thing to do to prevent transmission, but at the same time we were moving into uncharted territory where there was no certainty of the future. With the transition to online classes, the University hospital and clinics also made big changes. Required temperature checks were enforced upon entry into the hospital, and face masks 16 were mandatory at all times. I didn’t know it at the time, but for the 2 months following the initial lockdown, I was called off completely and didn’t step foot into the hospital once. I had just gotten used to a routine that included both work and school, and now not being able to go to classes on campus or go to work put a serious kink in my routine. I suddenly had no place to physically be at any given time, and I became completely sedentary. Struggling to get through the days, I quickly became burnt out with school and developed serious boredom and anxiety about the uncertain future. During quarantine from March to June I completed a 1000-piece puzzle, consumed too much coffee just to get me through the day, re-watched Grey’s Anatomy for the 5th time, and wasted hours a day scrolling on the notorious app of TikTok. A study by Labrague and Ballad (2021) examined lockdown fatigue in college students and found that participants experienced a moderate level of fatigue during lockdown with reported tiredness or physical exhaustion, headaches and body pain, decreased motivation, and increased worry as the most pronounced symptoms of fatigue. None of my time consisted of any physical activity, and while many families began walking outside as spring turned to summer, I still remained sedentary. I knew both my mental health and physical health were taking a toll during this stressful and unprecedented time. I also knew that physical activity was a way of combatting that; however, I was stuck and completely unable to do any activity. Research by Woodruff et al. (2021) investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stress, physical activity and sedentary behavior and found that both screen-related sedentary behavior increased while physical activity decreased within the first month of the pandemic. They also identified access/equipment, time and motivation as some of the primary barriers to changes in physical activity. 17 Thinking back to lockdown, these findings applied directly to my experience; both my screen-time and sedentary time increased significantly, and in addition to my feelings of burnout, I severely lacked motivation to change. Initially, I spent a lot of time recovering from the rapid change and wasn’t ready to return to my normal life that wasn’t going to be normal anymore. During the ongoing lockdown, I had adapted to a new homeostasis, and after 3 months of struggling at home I had a realization. I realized that I was unhappy living at this particular homeostasis and was finally ready for a change. 18 REINTEGRATION After months of being confined to my apartment, I faced yet another disruption; this time a positive one. My apartment gym finally opened up in June and I felt ready to move my body again, but going back to my exercise routine before lockdown seemed daunting, and I felt scared to go back. I was initially scared to see how I’d “let myself go”, and how “unfit” I became. So, I started small by doing what I had seen everyone do on TikTok during quarantine; I started a Chloe Ting program. Chloe Ting is a fitness youtuber who posts workout programs and workout videos. Her videos became popular on TikTok and became a way to get people moving during lockdown. This challenge was something that I felt comfortable structuring into my life. So, I created a calendar and I told myself that I was going to follow it, and ultimately this is what saved me. This workout program and calendar are what gave me the confidence to start being physically active again. While my exercise habits were beginning to return to normal, the other aspects of my life were certainly not. When I was finally able to go back into work, everything was locked down and my clinic was moving 100% to virtual visits. The training that I went through in February no longer applied and I had to re-learn how to do my job. At the time I hadn’t realized it, but I was going through the resilience process. I was learning how to cope with a disruption, and in doing so, reintegrating with tools that reinforce innate resilient qualities. Everything getting locked down was the major disruption which displaced me where I became completely sedentary for months. The opening of my apartment gym marked the beginning of the reintegration process for me where I used skills that I had previously acquired to then formulate an exercise calendar which ultimately reinforced my resilient qualities. This challenge only marked the 19 beginning of the reintegration process regarding my exercise behavior, but there were still other parts of my life in which the reintegration process had not begun. By January 2021 the concepts of social distancing and masking were no longer alien and became a regular practice. With the release of the COVID-19 vaccine many were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. With the world slowly starting to open up by March 2021, my world had pretty much remained the same. I had managed to remain physically active, school was still online, and I was still having to adapt to the everchanging rules at work. There was no returning to my previous norms, and from June 2020 on, the world had to find its new normal. Along with everyone else, the changes in my life created a new normal that looked substantially different from my pre-lockdown normal. The way we live our lives may never be the same as they were prior to COVID-19, but the change that we went through on individual, communal, and global levels has the potential to improve our systems to make them more adaptable when challenges hit. 20 REFLECTION AND RECOMMENDATIONS Reflecting on not only the past year and half, but also my entire life, I now see how the resiliency process has applied to my experiences. I may not have been conscience of it, but I was always moving through the resiliency process in the different aspects of my life. I started this thesis by sharing a memory of an injury that changed my life, but even prior to that the theme of resiliency was subconsciously present. My injury was simply too large of a disruption for me to ignore, and because of its immense impact on my life I felt the need to explore my experience on a deeper level. As seen by the continuing process of disruptions and reintegration, resilience is present in everyone’s lives whether we are aware of it or not. A deeper level of self-awareness is required to fully understand how you and your circumstances fit within the resiliency process. Thinking back to my injury and the relevance of the resiliency process, I believe I may not have reintegrated resiliently right away. Initially, I reintegrated with loss, and over time, I continued to reintegrate ultimately reintegrating resiliently. I’ve had disruptions in the form of injuries in the past, but none of them as profound as this one. Furthermore, none of my previous injuries resulted in alteration of my mind, body, and spirit. While reintegration is multifaceted, I think one of the predictors of reintegration is the level at which your mind, body, and spirit are affected and the seriousness of each one. In this case, all three were altered, with more emphasis placed on the body, which makes a huge difference in how I now reflect on the resilience process applying to my experience. In the case of quarantine, I similarly felt an alteration in my mind, body, and spirit, but with a heavier emphasis on mind and spirit. While my body wasn’t physically altered, as it was with an injury, I went from exercising 6 days a week to becoming completely 21 sedentary, and in doing so somehow lost a connection with my body. Initially, I had reintegrated with loss; loss of motivation, loss of drive, and loss of spirit. I remember this period being a time of trying to find my footing after such sudden change; a time that I called “recovery.” The disruption of my apartment gym opening up gave me an opportunity to go through reintegration again, but this time more resiliently. This is where I used familiar skills to help create structure by making a routine I knew I could stick with. During quarantine, when I was struggling in the realms of mind, body, and spirit, I kept asking myself, “Am I the only one feeling like this?” A year and half later, research shows that I, indeed, wasn’t the only one feeling this way. There was a global struggle with screen-time, burnout, and physical inactivity, but at the time it felt lonely and I did feel like the only one who was struggling. Through reflection of the application of the resiliency process, I’ve been able to validate not only my own feelings, but also others as it relates to exercise behavior during the pandemic. In all three examples of the resiliency process I’ve presented in this paper, I used tools that I had acquired through previous reintegration processes to create structure that helped me get through difficult times. When I got a new job, I used my organizational skills to logistically merge my work and school schedules. While this may be a seemingly obvious and minor procedure, it’s skills like these that we ultimately rely on to get through difficult times. Furthermore, when I was ready to exercise again after lockdown, I again reverted to using my organizational skills to create an exercise calendar. These are some examples that I have provided in this thesis, and while these examples are specific to me, this principle can extend beyond my experience. 22 The only thing in this world that we can do when faced with adversity is have compassion for ourselves and others because there is no definitive way to ensure resilient reintegration when faced with adversity. With the help of introspection and reflection a greater self-awareness and confidence can be developed to build an individual’s belief that they can reintegrate resiliently. Instances in which an individual has previously reintegrated resiliently continues to build this belief. Additionally, there should be a desire to resiliently reintegrate so as to engage in introspection. The journey of resiliency never ends, but overtime we can become more self-aware of our tendencies, habits, and driving forces to become more in tune with our resilient qualities. We may never, and probably will never, get to a point where a disruption as serious as a global pandemic does not displace our mind, body, or spirit in some way. All we can do is develop a progression so that we can feel better prepared for the next serious disruption. 23 REFERENCE LIST Berkes, Fikret, & Ross, Helen. (2013). Community Resilience: Toward an Integrated Approach. 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Southwick, George A. Bonanno, Ann S. Masten, Catherine Panter-Brick & Rachel Yehuda (2014) Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives, European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 5:1, 25338, DOI:103402/ejpt.v5.25338 Ungar, Michael. (2018). Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of 24 change in contexts of adversity. Ecology and Society, 23(4), 34. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10385-230434 Woodruff, S. J., Coyne, P., & St‐Pierre, E. (2021). Stress, physical activity, and screen related sedentary behaviour within the first month of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Applied Psychology : Health and Well-Being, 13(2), 454–468. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12261 Name of Candidate: Grace Lewis Date of Submission: December 14, 2021