Hospitable to Myself Between Seasons

I’m writing this in the in-between – the quiet days before I’m admitted to the hospital for observation and treatment. There’s a date on the calendar, circled like a small horizon. I’m preparing, counting pills, trying to hold myself steady. I live with bipolar disorder, an illness that demands attention, patience, and a kind of surrender.

I am also aromantic and asexual. Those are not illnesses. They are truths of who I am, steady and neutral, as unremarkable and as formative as my handwriting. Yet the world often folds everything together, as if solitude must be a symptom, or as if the absence of romance explains the presence of crisis. It doesn’t. My identities are constants; my illness is weather.

I wrote previously about the “economy of solitude,” about living in a world built for pairs. This, perhaps, is its sequel – a reflection on what resilience looks like when solitude is both chosen and challenged by the fluctuations of the mind. Not recovery, not victory, just the quiet practice of staying.

The world likes resilience stories that end in recovery – the neat arc from breakdown to breakthrough. Mine isn’t like that. It’s cyclical, like my moods, like the seasons of my own brain. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe resilience, for me, is learning to live within that loop without shame.

Redefining Resilience

Resilience, I’ve learned, is less about hardness and more about flexibility, the willingness to keep reshaping your days around what’s possible. My version of resilience looks like soft structure: pill organizers, alarms, lists that keep me tethered to time. The repetition is both comfort and a reminder that I am still here, still participating in the ordinary work of being alive.

People like to imagine resilience as independence. And maybe that fits, in part – I live alone, I make my own structure, I don’t have a partner to lean on. But the truth is, independence can be a heavy kind of grace. There’s no one else to refill prescriptions or notice when my voice goes flat. Sometimes solitude is peace; sometimes it’s paperwork and exhaustion. I love my solitude – I chose it, I built a life around it – but illness makes even chosen things harder to carry.

Misunderstandings and Precision

There are days when I feel like a contradiction: someone who doesn’t want a partner but still needs help. The world isn’t designed for that combination. Systems of care are built around families, couples, and emergency contacts whose names imply familial intimacy. The forms never ask, Who are the friends who keep you alive? Who do you text when your brain turns against you? They ask for a spouse, a next of kin, someone who can legally speak for you.

Being aroace means I’m used to mistranslation. People assume solitude equals loneliness, or that the absence of romance must be a hole I want filled. It’s strange to live in a world where love is seen as both the cure and the proof of sanity. When I say I don’t experience romantic attraction, there’s a pause – and sometimes pity. When I say I’m bipolar, there’s another pause, sharper this time, edged with caution. Together, they create an echo chamber of misunderstanding. But they also make me deliberate about the language I use to describe myself.

There is resilience in precision, in naming things correctly, refusing to let others define you by their confusion. I’ve had to learn to separate solitude from isolation, stillness from stagnation, mood swings from moral failure. To say: this is an episode, not a personality flaw; this is a preference, not a wound. I think of resilience as a kind of taxonomy, a careful sorting of truths from noise.

The Small Triumphs

I don’t want to romanticize illness. There is nothing poetic about insomnia, mania, or despair. But there are small, unglamorous triumphs: waking up after a night when I didn’t think I would, calling my psychiatrist when I feel I need to talk between our scheduled appointments, making tea or brushing my teeth, answering a message instead of disappearing. Each of these moments is a stitch in the fabric of endurance. They don’t make good headlines, but they make a life.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if the world understood resilience as maintenance instead of a miracle. If it valued the steady hands that refill prescriptions as much as the hands that build empires. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to appear stable – the good patient, the responsible adult, the unproblematic daughter, the supportive friend – that I sometimes forget that instability is part of the pattern. There is no perfect version of me waiting on the other side of treatment. There’s only the ongoing negotiation between my brain and my intentions.

Anticipation and Hospitality

Before the hospital date was set, I hesitated. Part of me worried it meant failure, that all my self-management wasn’t enough. But another part recognized it as an act of care, a continuation of that same resilience. Admitting I need structured help doesn’t erase my autonomy; it expands it. It’s a way of saying: I want to keep living, and I’m willing to accept the support that makes that possible.

I don’t know what the hospital will be like. I picture white corridors, maybe a window with a view of something unremarkable – trees, a parking lot, a bit of sky. I’ll bring books. Maybe I’ll write about time moving differently in there, or about the odd intimacy of being surrounded by strangers who are also trying to stay alive. Maybe I’ll write about how resilience sometimes looks like surrender: letting someone else watch over you for a while.

When I leave, the world will still be loud with its expectations – to partner up, to get better, to be productive again. But I hope to return with a gentler definition of resilience. Not as resistance to weakness, but as a form of hospitality toward myself. The willingness to keep offering myself space, patience, and care, even when my mind is a difficult guest.

I used to think resilience meant proving something – that I could live alone, manage everything, be unbreakable. Now I think it’s the opposite. Resilience is the permission to break, to rest, to rebuild in quieter ways. It’s knowing that solitude isn’t a flaw and that bipolar disorder isn’t a moral test. It’s the ongoing, imperfect act of staying with myself, even when staying feels impossible.

Practice of Staying

The date is still circled in my calendar. I keep glancing at it, not with dread but with a kind of acceptance. There’s a strange relief in knowing help is coming, even if it’s temporary, even if it means being seen in all my vulnerable humanity. I don’t know what resilience will look like inside those hospital walls. Maybe it will look like taking my medication on time. Maybe it will look like laughing with someone I just met. Maybe it will just look like breathing.

But I know this much: resilience isn’t something I earn. It’s something I practice. And right now, writing these words – before the hospital, before the next season, before whatever comes next – is part of that practice.