If it doesn’t kill you, does it really make you stronger?
During an intense ill-heath episode over the past two weeks, one of my biggest takeaways was German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
What started as a sore tooth and ended as an infected spider bite (unrelated, but somehow related) goes down as one of my toughest, most unpleasant
but transformative — Covid19 lockdown stories.
Supportive friends peppered my sickbed with WhatsApp messages and left paper bags of homemade bread and rusks at the gate.
My teen daughter snapped between online schooling and feeding the dog and her brother (in that order; but it got done).
My husband moulded backto-back meetings around making tea, ferrying to the shops and, at one stage, telling me that no, I wouldn’t die today, and that the pain killers he’d just brought from the pharmacy really would work.
Why Nietzsche kept popping up I don’t know, as I have a low pain threshold and am prone to bargaining desperately for relief.
I’m not brave in the face of sickness. I don’t want it, I hate it, and the self-pity wallow that sometimes makes it bearable doesn’t work for me.
I’d rather be forced to splinter rocks with a blunt nail file, in the sweltering sun, than be forced to lie in bed during daylight hours, wracked by chills and ice-pick headaches.
Some people view it as necessary time off — an urgent reset by the body — but I view it with only annoyance and complete panic.
Perhaps that’s why I needed philosophy to bring some meaning to the experience, especially because the circumstances were so bizarre.
I can’t explain why a sore tooth (face) and spider bite (leg) teamed up to drag me down.
Psychologists worry about the Nietzsche quote, which is “generally used as an affirmation of resilience”, explains Noam Shpancer of Psychology Today.
He feels that what doesn’t kill us, makes us weaker, though we embrace Nietzsche because we need to find meaning in what happens to us — we need to believe in the transformative power of trauma.
“Now, it is true that, in an evolutionary sense, those who survive a calamity are by definition the fittest,” he says.
“But it is not the calamity that made them so. For our minds, however, the leap is short between seeing the strong emerge from a calamity and concluding that they are strong because of the calamity.
“Our brain is a meaningmaking machine, designed to sort vast and varied sensory information into coherent, orderly perception, organised primarily in the form of narrative: this happened, which led to that, which ended up so.
“When two things happen together, we assume they are meaningfully linked, and we rush to bind them in a quite unholy cause-and-effect matrimony.”
He argues that our eagerness to ease the pain of suffering by rationalising it, along with our tendency to look for information supportive of our pre-existing beliefs and see “meaning and causality in cooccurrence”, help explain how we arrive at our believe in “the school of hard knocks”.
I do understand his argument, particularly since psychological research shows, as a rule, that if you’re stronger after hardship and trauma, this is probably despite and not because of the hardship.
But, after emerging from my dark days of antibiotic creams, watching the clock until pillpopping time, night sweats and daily dehydration, I do feel stronger. And it was because I was sick.
I wouldn’t wish it on myself, or anybody else — there are easier ways to grow, develop and be more resilient than we were yesterday.
But if it’s going to happen — and it does — then why not turn the pain into some sort of philosophy?
Even if that just means a greater appreciation of health, or valuing being physically able to lift one’s arm for a squirt of deodorant?
What didn’t kill me made me stronger. And I’ll take what I can get in 2020.