'I've survived unimaginable loss three times. But please don't call me resilient.'

The other day, a friend sent me a meme that read: 

"You're so resilient!" Thanks! My options were that or dead.

This made me laugh because my love language is acts of meme, but also because: true.

There is a false assumption that resilience is a choice. I am not 'choosing' to be resilient; I am just existing in a life that has imploded spectacularly on many different days and in many different ways.

When I was in my twenties, my boyfriend died suddenly and unexpectedly while we were sleeping. When I was in my thirties, my brother died from a similar heart condition while he was at work. And two years ago, our 12-year-old son was hospitalised and put on life support after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma and a rare nerve condition that has paralysed him and left him quadriplegic.

Strong? Yes. But like, by necessity, not by choice.

Listen to Natasha Sholl's story on No Filter. Post continues below.

Next week, our son Ezra, who is now 14, will attend his first training session as the assistant coach of a basketball team made up of his friends.

For a kid who lived and breathed basketball before his life-changing diagnosis, to continue to foster his love of the game despite no longer being able to play, shows just how tough he is.

What this doesn't show is all the hard work that has gone on behind the scenes. The gruelling physio sessions. The way he has adapted to using assistive technology to be able to brainstorm all his plays. The way he has had to make peace with not being able to play a sport he loves while still championing his friends from the sidelines.

And while this is all a credit to him and his amazing attitude, this couldn't have happened without community support, his best mate, Ethan, who has been begging him to be assistant coach for two seasons, and the basketball league, who ensured his team's training was at a wheelchair-accessible venue. It couldn't have happened without the allied health professionals who work tirelessly behind the scenes, or the NBA players who have heard about Ezra and continue to send him signed jerseys and champion him.

Not every kid can say they received a video message from Shaq, that Josh Giddey came to his 13th birthday and Dante Exum came over for afternoon tea, or that Joe Ingles texts him just to check in.

And you know what? Had he decided that he wasn't ready to coach basketball yet (as he did last season), he would be equally resilient. And we would be equally as proud.

Natasha with her family. Image: Natasha Sholl.

We need to stop judging resilience based on 'results' or what we see from the outside. We need to stop pointing and demanding resilience from people who are traumatised, exhausted or at breaking point. It sets us all up for failure. Resilience, like basketball, is a team sport.

There is the age-old saying that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, which is nice in theory. But I am not a better or stronger person now than I was before *waves hands* everything. I am just a different person because life is different now.

We don't need to be 'glass half-full' in every situation. Sometimes life is unfair and terrible things happen, and we cope as best we can.

For Natasha, resilience has taken on a different meaning. Image: Natasha Sholl.

What didn't kill me made me funnier, I guess. It also gave me complex PTSD. And crippling anxiety attacks. It's made me lonely and exhausted and filled with grief and longing for my old life and the person I used to be.

It's also made me proud and grateful and filled with love for my support crew. Life is never one thing. I am equally as resilient on the very worst moments of my very worst days as I am on the days where I look strong to the outside world.

"In recent months, I have replied to friends' queries with this line: 'Our life is never going to be all right again, but we are doing all right', wrote by author Yiyun Li after the death of her two sons. It reminds me of how I responded to our middle child when he asked me, while his brother was on life support a few suburbs away, to promise him that everything would be okay. I knew what he was really asking me (tell me that everything will go back to how it was) and I knew that I couldn't lie to him.

"Things will be okay," I said, "We just don't know what 'okay' looks like right now."

And it's true. Things are okay. We have just had to change our definition of what okay means.

Things are not all right. They are all wrong. But we are doing alright. We are doing the best we can.

We will be okay. Somehow. And I suppose, in its essence, that's what resilience is after all.

Catch Natasha Sholl on SBS Insight's Challenging Resilience episode on SBS On Demand.

For more from Natasha, you can find her here.

Feature image: Natasha Sholl.