Metal

My musings around metal brought me to the phrase ‘made of mettle’ which refers to strength of character. I’ve thought a lot over the past year about young people in their late teens, what has been lost and what barriers they’ve faced, living through a pandemic at this stage in their lives; might this generation, by no determination of their own, be inherently made of mettle? There are the obvious difficulties…altered exams, fractured school experiences, absence of depended-upon, ending rituals and relational connections alongside more obscure limitations such as extensive waiting lists for driving tests and setting sights on universities and towns they have never visited, due to travel restrictions. In 2017 I conducted a study amongst adolescents on resilience, my findings reinforced that the inter-relationship between resilience and adversity is a complex one, but overall there was a significant correlation between high adversity and lowered resilience. I know from practice and from personal experience that while this can be true in cases where attachment, consistency or safety lend themselves to confidence, actualisation, individuation or maturation…this is not always the case. Sometimes, negative experiences fertilise resourcefulness and a tenacious quality, much like the mouse who fell in a bucket of cream and who struggled so hard that he churned the cream into butter and successfully crawled out (Frank Abagnale). I wonder how the pandemic will factor in to this question around resilience, from personal experience as lead clinician in a large high school I know that the demand for mental health and wellbeing services has been stratospheric in recent months; is this indicative of diminished resilience? Perhaps more-so of prolonged uncertainty, a disconnect that has for some, lent itself to isolation, or the myriad of other potential challenges faced when living in strange circumstances, many of which can be encompassed by the term ‘loss’. Mettle or metal has such strong connotations, a sense of being unbreakable, of other elements simply bouncing off, is it this robustness that young people today will have in spades as they grow? There’s also something about previously hard edges being sanded down or softened by the flexibility we’ve needed while navigating lives over which we’ve had lesser control. Either way, my admiration for adolescents who have navigated these extreme obstacles is boundless, I am so very fortunate to work directly with them and hopefully, play a part in helping to make sense (if we can!) of all that has happened and how this affects what lies ahead.