Becca Bailey

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Reading path

Community & Resilience

Essays on resilience, burnout, moral injury, mutual aid, and the structures that help people survive difficult times together.

Essays in this path

  1. 1.

    Resilience Is a Systems Problem

    Why grit isn't enough

    After a project failed during the chaos of 2020, I went looking for personal explanations and found something else: decades of resilience research that treats hardship as expected, not exceptional. This essay traces what protective factors are, why workplaces keep outsourcing disruption to individuals, and what ants, maintenance, and leaving music education taught me about adaptation versus grit. The question that interests me now is not how we become tough enough to endure any hardship — it is how we build communities where no one is asked to endure hardship alone.

Further reading