I have survived in a public library when hiring freezes lost us two full-time and one-part time person, where we were piling books on the floor of our back room and eventually resorted to volunteer labor (to be very clear here, we were asking people to do unpaid labor in place of what had been two full-time and one half-time jobs, two full-time and one half-time jobs which no longer existed for people in our community to support themselves and their families, two full-time and one half-time jobs for which skilled and aspiring library paraprofessionals could apply and in which they could gain experience). This could be seen as resilience but this was failure to our workers, our community, and our potential employees.
I have worked at an under-funded, under-siege library as a contractor, where I had to be resilient in the face of administration and other loud voices who forced librarians to defend every decision. I have been forbidden to weed duplicate copies of books which haven't been off the shelf, let alone circulated, in 30 years and have 3 newer editions. Our shelvers experienced physical pain when shelving because of how impossibly tight the shelves were. When given permission to weed some areas by the library director, I still had to smuggle books out of the building with the collaboration of the maintenance staff so that the hostile users might not see them. I was not able to give away weeded books to patrons who might've been interested. I survived it, but nothing about this and any resilience the library workers showed during that time is inspirational or good. This should be named as a toxic experience.
I have worked in a place where library workers were so badly protected that one with a number of medical conditions, including a weak heart, was required to work within the library even as it was under construction, with too little protection, until one day she had a serious asthma attack which required medical attention.
This is BAD. This is all BAD. This have not been good times in my life or career. These have not been healthy. The last workplace mentioned gave me such intense stress I was regularly throwing up on my walk to work and I was only able to "solve" the problem by getting out of there. Resilient was making myself appear positive during all of this so that I could find a way out without breaking down. Resilient was trying to be there for my colleagues as we all got through this together. Resilient was doing my best to do my work well under the circumstances.
Resilience always happens because something is wrong or bad or dangerous.
We cannot just accept that things are bad or going to be bad, so we have to be resilient. We do need to provide support to each other when we're in these kinds of situations. We should fight back (and lots of us do, which is good). We should create a culture where we don't have to put on bright faces and share how "oh I'm managing." If we crumble under these conditions, we should not be blamed for not being resilient enough. We should not be offered resilience as an alternative to health.
I don't want resilience to be our thing. I want to be working toward places where we don't need to be resilient. I want to acknowledge the toll that resilience takes.