I don’t know about you but February has always been a difficult month for me. It’s the month, while the shortest in the calendar, often feels the longest. February is the very quiet lull between the deep winter and the promise of spring just around the corner.

But this past February has been especially hard. The snow finally arrived in my town – with a wallop. It brought with it darker, overcast skies and a blanket of heaviness over the city. Amidst the presence of this overdue winter, the frustration with the current state of the world just started to feel a bit overwhelming.

When this happens, I know that it’s easy to begin to start feeling down or being hard on yourself for not being able to handle it better. It’s easy to think that you should just be able to deal with things and move on. It’s so very easy to say to yourself: “I should be doing better than this.”

But what I think is important to remember is that there is no barometer for “doing better” right now. We have never been through this before. So therefore, there is no standard to reach. There is only doing our best and trying to get by.

This is the very definition of resilience: doing our best and trying to get by. Resilience is not about being impervious to struggle and strife. And it’s not a nebulous quality that is something you have or don’t have. Resilience is fundamentally coded in our DNA, in all the cells of our being. The evidence for this is the very fact of our continued existence – that we are still here. Or more simply, resilience is our default, not an exception.

I’ve been trying to do my best and reminding myself that I have lived resilience everyday. And I’m here to say, so have you – even if it doesn’t feel like it. Remind yourself, when you can and especially on the hard days: you are resilient and living it everyday.