Multiple participants experienced vindication when their persistence and resilience “paid off.” They did their research, built relationships, nurtured families, and planted seeds for envisioned institutional change.
The vindication was empowering, a relief. It was a victory for supporters past and present who had believed in the participants for no real reason except that they mattered to them. It could feel like the start of returning home and bringing your past effervescent self into the future.
Resilience felt bittersweet, though, when it was constantly required in every dimension of work and life, when resilience meant persisting through the deaths of family members, episodes of chronic illness and disabilities, and the “pearl-clutching” resistance of colleagues to equity-centered actions on campus.
But you won that one fight. And that counts.
Studies
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