Dear Friends, 

You are not diamonds. You are Buckminsterfullerene. 

Many years ago I watched a BBC Horizon science documentary about a new carbon allotrope. Forged by vaporising carbon with a laser in a supersonic helium beam – Buckminsterfullerene has a molecular structure similar to the geodesic domes built by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller. Hence the name. You know the kind of thing, footballs, the early warning radomes on Fylingdales Moor in North Yorkshire, back in the days of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Eden Centre.  

The documentary described one aspect of Buckminsterfullerene that I’ve never forgotten. The structure – strong but also flexible – can compress and bend out of shape allowing it to bounce off the hardest form of carbon, diamond. The scientists nicknamed them Bucky-balls. 

We often think that to be resilient we must be like diamonds. Unyielding, one of the hardest substances known to man. Trouble will bounce off us leaving us unperturbed. Perfectly resolute in our course. Always sparkling. Never pained. Never complaining. The terribly British stiff upper lip. 

This is complete and utter horse-shit. 

We meet trouble like Buckminsterfullerene that has been fired at a diamond. Trouble is the hard edge that bends us out of shape and send us spiralling off in unplanned directions. And because we are not actually geodesic carbon molecules – but flesh, blood, bone and feeling – this process is not painless. Impact hurts. Bending out of shape hurts. Regaining our shape hurts too. Sometimes, because we are an altogether more complicated arrangement of carbon and other atoms, encountering trouble will leave us permanently altered. 

I believe that true resilience lies in acknowledging and sitting with those pains. Grief, anxiety, rage. Hope, love, joy. None of these will leave you unscathed. Sometimes they will hurt like hell. But if you sit with them, feel them and watch them, as they pass through they will change and move, reshaping themselves, reshaping you. It is OK to cry out in pain. It is OK to rant on Twitter and whinge to the highest heavens. It is OK to laugh and whoop! 

Many people, many organisations, would prefer your silence. They would prefer you to believe that trouble should bounce off you. They would prefer it if, no matter how much they dick you around, you, and you alone are responsible for responding in ways they deem appropriate. Switch off, buy a wellness candle, take a bubble bath. Do not complain lest it be known that what is really needed is deep, complex, change.

I don’t believe them anymore. It doesn’t work. I don’t think it makes the world a better place. 

You are not diamonds. You are Bucky-balls. 

I love that about you.