This is the fifth post in my Architecting my Life series. If you enjoy it and want to read more, I put the links to the others at the end. (I need to add a trigger warning to this one. It’s a really personal story that might be difficult to read.)
Resilient solutions handle change well and recover from failures quickly and effectively. — Well-Architected — Resilient
During the final walkthrough of my mom’s house, I took one last look at the dent in the living room drywall. It was hidden behind a fresh coat of paint, and if the new owners even noticed it at all, they’d probably just think someone bumped a piece of furniture against it. I was happy to see that. They didn’t need to know the real story.
When I was eleven years old my mom’s ex-boyfriend threw a dinner plate at me. I moved out of the way just in time for it to shatter behind me, leaving a big gash in the drywall. I ran into my bedroom, locked the door and hid there until I fell asleep. My mom cleaned up the broken glass and dry food the next morning but the drywall damage stayed until I finally patched it up after she passed away.
I don’t remember what I did to make her ex throw something at me that night. Things like that (and worse) happened all the time, and the memories all started to blend together after a while. Today I just have a bunch of scars and a vague set of recollections of where they came from.
People in abusive relationships often hear comments like “well if it’s that bad, you should just leave”, as if the person being abused never thought about leaving. It’s never that easy.
The biggest roadblock my mom and I had to deal with was our state’s archaic legal system. When married couples divorce, they might bicker over how to divide their assets, but judges still have guidelines to refer to when they make their final decisions. Those guidelines didn’t apply to my mom and her ex because they had co-signed for a mortgage without being married during a time when laws weren’t written to accommodate people “living in sin”. That put us in a situation where there was no way for us to make him leave, but if we left, he could have claimed that we abandoned our house and kept it for himself. And since we had already survived being homeless a few years earlier, the thought of losing another home and having to start over again was terrifying.
My mom explained all of this to me and asked me be strong while she figured things out. This isn’t the kind of conversation a parent should have to have with their eleven year old child, but it helped me understand what was going on. It also helped me to realize that I had been wrong about what needed to happen for things to get better.
In the beginning, I thought that someone else was going to come and save us. Then I realized that the adults I thought I could trust weren’t going to help. I had called the police to come break up fights at my house so many times that they started greeting me by my first name when they came to the door. They would hang out for a while to try and de-escalate things, and then they’d leave and the yelling would start again before they were a block away. I stopped calling them because it was a waste of everyone’s time. When one of my teachers told a school counselor that they were worried about me, she pulled me out of class to ask a bunch of questions about what was going on at home. I told her I was fine, even though I clearly wasn’t. I never heard from her again. Apparently she had checked whatever box she needed to check to show the state that she had followed up on the tip she got and that was enough. This is why systems fail.
I stopped waiting for help and started focusing my energy on the things that my mom and I could do to make things better on our own. She had saved up enough money to get a lawyer, and when she came home from her meetings with him to tell me about the best case scenarios they had discussed, I would make lists of what our backup options could be if those things didn’t work out.
Eventually a judge ruled that my mom and I could keep our house, but there were a couple caveats: We wouldn’t receive any financial support from her ex, and she had to sign an agreement stating that if she was ever late with a mortgage or tax payment, he would have the option to take over payments and reclaim the property.
Even after he was gone, we still had to worry about money, so I got my first job on my fifteenth birthday. I wasn’t legally allowed to start working for another year, but a local restaurant owner who knew about my situation looked the other way about my age. I’m forever grateful to him.
When I started college I worked two jobs so I could pay my tuition without having to take on any additional debt. Working as many hours as I did meant that it would take longer to get my degree, but it was worth it. I graduated debt free.
In the years since then, I’ve worked my way into leadership roles at several different companies while also juggling side hustles to make sure I’d have backup income sources if I ever lost my primary job. Working on so many different things simultaneously helped me get a lot of experience and develop a wide variety of skills in a short time. It wasn’t long before I was able to combine all of my learnings together and use them to advance my career even further. I used the extra money I made to pay off my mortgage early and build up a savings that I can use as a backup if any of my income sources ever dry up.
Time and therapy have taught me that all the backup planning and redundancies I’ve put in place to protect myself are trauma responses. But I’ve also learned that these things aren’t necessarily bad as long as I can be strategic about the way I approach them. I never would have achieved as much as I have as an adult if I hadn’t learned to become as resilient as I did when I was a child.
Resilience is the key for growth and success. It’s about bouncing back from setbacks and failures gracefully. It’s about not letting things that you can’t control stop you from doing what you want to do. These are good traits for anyone to have and you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to develop them.
As an architect, you can take steps to include resilience in your designs as well:
- Make sure your business has policies and processes in place that describe how to respond to unexpected security or availability incidents and prevent them from happening again (Incident Response).
- Create a business continuity plan to make sure that your organization will continue to function in the event of a system failure (Continuity Planning).
- Manage your environments and release cycles to make it easier for your organization to respond to changes quickly, without compromising quality or stability (Application Lifecycle Management).
Making your architecture more resilient will increase your organization’s likelihood of growing successfully as well. It’ll decrease the volume and severity of the types of critical incidents that can lower the ROI associated with the systems you design. Take a look at Well-Architected — Resilient for more information. And try to identify scenarios in your own life where you might be able to make yourself more resilient as well.
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