Recently I’ve been considering what nature can teach us about resilience in a culture that worships hustle, purity, and self-optimization.
That question has been the seed of some very non-academic research I’ve been doing to satisfy my own curiosity, and a collection of essays I’m releasing beginning with this one. This idea hasn’t emerged from textbooks; it has sprouted from some reflections on my life here on Witching Hour Farm, my roots in herbalism, my departure from my brick-and-mortar apothecary shop Queen City Alchemy a few years ago, and our familial experiences with chronic illnesses.
In all things and because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, I stand on the shoulders of giants and am pulling information from dear friends, researchers, scientists, poets, and writers alike. I continue to be inspired, grateful, and humbled by the ways that work across a number of different disciplines holds up a mirror to my own experiences and helps me better understand the web of life.
My Irish Exit From Wellness Culture
Although in hindsight the transition has occurred over the last several years, this last year I’ve really taken the Irish exit from the wellness industry.
Not from my belief in the healing power of plants, or from seasonal devotion, or aspirations for more earth-aligned living—but from the broader performance of “wellness” that increasingly feels like a purity test. A system that tells us we must scrub ourselves clean, optimize every cell, and earn our way back into being “whole.”
Sociologists have written about this trend—how wellness has become a modern form of healthism, where virtue is measured through lifestyle, discipline, and purity. Others, like writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Cederström & Spicer, argue that wellness has become a moral performance more than a pathway to care.
What I came to know was far simpler: When wellness starts making you sick, it’s time to bounce.
So I did.
What We Get Wrong About Resilience
In our current culture, resilience is framed as “toughing it out.” Try harder. Push through. Bootstrap your way into transcendence. But in ecology, resilience means something entirely different.
Ecologist C.S. Holling defined resilience not as force, but as the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change. Holling’s work became the foundation for “panarchy” theory, which emphasizes that resilience is cyclical—a dance between growth, release, and renewal. Seasonal, mythic, underworld language is already embedded in the science.
Pollinator plants embody this beautifully. Many of our most beloved pollinator species like goldenrod, monarda, milkweed, mountain mint, vervain—are what disturbance ecologists call early-successional plants. They’re not fragile. They thrive in edges, gaps, and after storms.
Researchers like Pickett & White showed that disturbance is not the enemy of an ecosystem—it’s the catalyst for biodiversity and renewal.
In other words: resilience means changing the way you live, not forcing yourself back into what you were.
Pollinator plants also rely on mutualistic networks. Studies by Bascompte & Jordano show that ecosystems stay resilient not because any single plant is strong, but because the web of relationships is diverse and redundant. Resilience is interdependence—not personal perfection.
Wellness, Purity, and the Myth of Becoming Whole Again
One of the most damaging messages of modern wellness culture is that health is something you can “achieve” through compliance. That to be valid, you must be made whole. And to be made whole, you must be perfect.
Disability justice writers like Mia Mingus, Patty Berne, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha challenge this idea. They remind us that wellness is not a destination or a state of purity. Wellness is a relationship, a practice of care, and a communal act.
So what does that look like for those of us with chronic illness, complex conditions, or no clear diagnosis at all?
What does wellness look like when your body refuses the myth of “bouncing back”?
Some problems aren’t meant to be solved in a single lifetime.
And still, we offer care.
We show up.
We adapt.
We root deeper into what remains possible.
A Descent as a Beginning, Not an Ending
Chronic illness has been, for me, a descent into an unfamiliar underworld—one that wellness culture has no real map for. It’s the moment in the myth where you stop trying to return to who you were, and instead ask:
What if I opt out of the whole damn thing?
What if wellness is about how well I move through the world? How well I’m supported and can offer support to those I love, and not how well I perform purity?
What if resilience is about trust and learning to see in the dark?
Writers like Anne Boyer, Porochista Khakpour, Sara Ramey, and Sophie Strand have documented how wellness culture fails those of us who live in bodies that are not fixable. Their work and others has helped give me language for my own experience.
Resilience might not be about bouncing back. Maybe it’s about re-rooting and sending new filaments of self into soil that feels more honest.
And there is hope here.
In fact, there’s more hope here than in any bullshit perfection narrative I’ve ever been sold.
If I’m the Canary in the Coal Mine…
People with chronic illness are often treated as fragile alarms, warnings for what others fear. But I see myself differently.
If I’m the canary in the coal mine, I might as well start singing.
The truth is, whether you are navigating life with a chronic illness or not, the way things are is not working well for the majority of us.
Canaries are not symbols of danger—they are creatures of sensitivity, attunement, and living in-between spaces. Ecopsychologists like Joanna Macy and Donna Haraway remind us that being sensitive to the world is not a weakness; it’s a form of ecological wisdom.
Maybe the way we survive is not by becoming harder, but by becoming more attuned.
More relational.
More honest.
Maybe this is the type of resilience we need to begin practicing and promoting.
Sources
Bascompte, J., & Jordano, P. (2007–2014). Mutualistic networks research.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23.
Holling, C. S., & Gunderson, L. H. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.
Macy, J. (n.d.). Works on ecological grief and interdependence.
Pickett, S. T. A., & White, P. S. (1985). The ecology of natural disturbance and patch dynamics. Academic Press.
Berne, P. (n.d.). Disability justice writings (Sins Invalid).
Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). The wellness syndrome. Polity Press.
Durrheim, K., et al. (n.d.). Research on healthism.
Ehrenreich, B. (2018). Natural causes: An epidemic of wellness, the certainty of dying, and killing ourselves to live longer. Twelve.
Mingus, M. (n.d.). Essays on access intimacy and disability justice.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Boyer, A. (2019). The undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Khakpour, P. (2018). Sick: A memoir. Harper Perennial.
Ramey, S. (2020). The lady’s handbook for her mysterious illness: A memoir. Blue Rider Press.
Strand, S. (2023). The body is a doorway: A memoir: A journey beyond healing, hope, and the human. Random House.
