he exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.