Meet Bella Robinson

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bella Robinson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bella below.

Hi Bella, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I never really considered the word resilience for the beginning part of my life, it wasn’t in my vocabulary of words I would use to describe myself. In 2023, it ended up being the most difficult season of my life, for many different reasons that are private to me. As a Christian, we would call this the season spent in ‘the wilderness’.

I have an extremely wide and constantly active imagination, which has often resulted in vivid dreams, nightmares, or distractions in my daily life. As this is the source of my creativity, it typically offers more benefit to my life than negative. If I am in a personally bad state however, it is nightmarish, unwelcome, and frightening. I kept being invaded by very brief images or sounds that would repeat so often that it was painful. This is a very difficult experience to describe, and might I preface that it is in no relation to any diagnosis where others suffer much more intense experiences of a different nature. For me it was as if I were watching various scenes from a film as I remembered them, flashing briefly in my mind only to disappear.

Towards the end of that season (which I didn’t know at the time), I was driving home and I remember praying to God telling Him word for word, “You need to take this away from me.” I still don’t quite know what it was I relinquished honestly to the dashboard of my car that night; and I didn’t realize that the hundreds of previous prayers of the same nature that I had made, I meant none of them.

I don’t wish to describe in detail what those six months were like for me; that period grows more personal for me the longer I have away from that time. And no one is a stranger to grief or difficulty in life. I feel self-indulgent to speak very much about it. Yet I wish to share that less than 24 hours later, after I had made that one prayer, I woke up, and everything that had en-massed into such a terrible period of my life, was absolutely gone. With absolutely no exaggeration, overnight, on a lonely day in October , I had not one nightmare from that day forth. No surpassing image to reckon with. It was like I had been entirely stripped of the previous year. I still to this day, have no explanation for the grace I was given at this time, although I may have an idea.

Shortly after this, one of my friends announced that she was running a marathon. My first triathlon a few years before had been an internal, almost compulsive decision. I knew I had to do it, and I signed up very quickly, even without any triathlon experience. I felt the same feeling with this marathon, which perfectly, was taking place in the White Mountains, one of my favorite places on earth. I didn’t realize that that previous summer, for those six months, I had been building a resiliency to my own life. This carried over into my training for that marathon, some of it without my own realization.

It has also carried over into my most recent decision at the end of 2024 to run a 50 mile ultra marathon this upcoming July in 2025. Perhaps this is why I’ve always been an actor as well, but my creativity in my brain doesn’t provide limits for itself. They quite literally don’t exist. I’ve never had creative blocks since I was little, and I’ve never had them as an adult. Perhaps my own eventually utilized and learned resilience also came from that. A lack of limits in imagining what is possible, even in a completely limited state.

I think the word resilience was always present in my life. I believe it was there from the very beginning, in my mother, but I had to learn what it meant for myself. My mother has been an athlete since she was a very young girl, but I’ve watched her go through every manner of testing in life, not through a six month period, but for years, and as a single mother. Reserving her privacy, I will not go into detail. But later on, I watched my own mother complete schooling, care for us, run marathons, and hike hundreds of mountains in a place we both love and other areas in the country, it fostered a seed of what that word ‘resilience’ would eventually mean for me.

I believe resilience is earned and it is built, and if others are called ‘resilient’, I believe it’s actually a different word that should be used oftentimes. Resilience is a word that you have to suffer to welcome it in. You have to pay a price, and if you don’t pay, you won’t earn it. And I don’t think we know we are building it until the season we are in is over. All the things that I love were built since I was very young, they didn’t just appear in my life as an adult. Running didn’t come out of nowhere, I’ve done it since I was very young, and later it would come up to serve me as an adult. Resiliency and other things for me, seem to have been there from the very beginning, festering underground until I needed to learn and use them.

I’ve watched others build this word for themselves, and I’ve watched others remain still in their experience of it, as it is painful and often unexpected. Resiliency is a cyclone to watch; my experience watching my own mother build it is a gift you can’t fake for your child. My own painful experience feels very minor to me in relation to others I know who have suffered, but I hope if I can provide anything for others, it would be my assuredness that the price you pay for resilience is worth paying.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I have a lot of different things that I love to involve myself in. Alongside all of these, I have my chickens and my two dogs to care for with my boyfriend! ha ha!

At the time being, I have two larger things happening this year. Last fall I completed a film created and directed by my incredible friend Mariah Larocque. The project is called “In Your Dreams”, a horror film where I played the lead female character, “Adeline”. My first film I ever did was a horror film, and I’ve always been drawn to that genre. I absolutely love it. This movie is what I think to be the best work I’ve ever done, and the character, the film itself, and the experience I had making it was the best I’ve had in my life. I try to keep a lot of myself out of the films that I make because in a heavier genre, I don’t like to get too close to the characters I’m playing. But in this movie, there were subtle details I left behind. Such as, my character is wearing my own cross necklace, which was bought for me by a good friend and blessed by a priest. On my hand is also a thick metal ring that I wear every day in real life, which has a small engraving of the Lord’s Prayer on it. These two items are very personal to me, and I wanted my character to wear them in the film as a nod to my own connection with Adeline’s experiences. Another detail, which no one would perhaps recognize unless I spoke about it, was that one of my outfits during the film was a direct nod to a character with the same outfit in one of my favorite films “A Ghost Story”, which I believe has the best portrayal of grief. I am wearing a light gray shirt with jeans and a loose ponytail. The female lead in that movie is experiencing grief, of which my character Adeline is also experiencing in this film. I styled my hair to look exactly as she did in that movie, and chose to wear nearly her exact outfit during the most crucial scene in our film.

I’m incredibly proud of the work done on this film by the phenomenal people I worked with, and I can’t wait for everyone to have the chance to see it this spring, 2025.

Lastly, this upcoming July 5th, I have the longest race I’ve ever trained for coming up. It’s a 50 mile (80 km) ultra trail marathon called the “Quebec Mega Trail” taking place in Quebec, Canada. I have some very intense training coming up with my coach for the next three months, and I’m very excited to see what happens on that day.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I feel as though I can’t fully speak for myself in this sense, but that others could better answer this for me. But I would say that the three qualities I may possess that have impacted my life the most would be: compassion, creativity, and faith.

When I was very young, I was bullied very badly over my being ‘kind’. It was a source of confusion for me because it was a quality I wasn’t taught but instead it came out of me without my control. It was the source of my intense sensitivity and it still is. I learned eventually that kindness or compassion or the currently overused word of ’empathy’ can be harsh, and this isn’t always a negative thing. Being what some would consider “harsh” or “tough” to those you love, if coming from a place of love, ‘is’ compassion. I think we equate empathy as meaning only affectionate, only gentle, and only positive. A convenience. As someone who doesn’t respond well to hardness when it comes to emotion, I do still realize that compassion can be expressed in many different ways, and these have to be recognized. I’ve always tried to think for other people. I’ve tried, with sometimes great difficulty, to put my own sensitivity aside in order to protect or serve others that I love in the way that would be best for them. This has taken me a long time to learn. But I also carry great pride in my gentleness and oftentimes soft maternal kindness towards others, which is my personal way of expressing compassion. I believe I’m very malleable to many different kinds of people because of this, and it’s impacted my life greatly, as I’ve never been exposed to only one opinion or one way of life.

Alongside this, my creativity, as I described before, has allowed me to have no limits in my mind as to how I might live my life or serve others. Because of my inherent creativity and my own form of compassion, it allows me to have a faith in God. I read recently a quote that said that science is the pursuit of religion; the pursuit of a God. The word religion comes from the Latin word ‘religio’, meaning ‘reverence’ or ‘bond’. The act of faith, whether you believe in a God or not, is an act of creativity. It is a faith in blindness, as you choose to believe in something that can’t be proven. What greater action of creativity or imagination is there?

My own abilities to create stories has impacted my life in a sense that I am always able to ask questions. As a society, we place limits on an unprecedented number of things, and therefore placing limits on ourselves.

If I could offer any advice to those trying to develop these qualities, or any other, I would say to ask questions. This is the most simple and comprehensive advice I could offer. Your limits, wherever they are, are moved by your questions. And by your limits, it does not only encompass things that are to your benefit. Limiting others, is what I believe to be one of the greatest acts of violence. This can come in many different forms. Compassion, the building of it, whatever that means to you, is found in thinking of other people and not yourself. It’s an act of sacrifice few can comprehend and I myself am still learning this.

So ask questions, ask a lot of them, and don’t stop asking them.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

I think it would be a failure on my part not to mention one of the most crucial foundations to my development as a person, which is my brother Forrest. Defining the relationship you have with a sibling I think changes throughout time. I couldn’t fathom just how much love I had for him until I saw him in great pain as an adult, and very recently at that. There’s an intense and almost primally urgent prayer to take their place. It’s one of the few circumstances in my life in which there was no hesitation. It’s a feeling I may never reckon with, should anything ever happen to him.

Forrest is the only person in my life I would define as being “out of the world”. I never think, since he was very little, that he ever really belonged to it. He felt always ‘apart’, yet had an undying closeness and dedication to those close to him, and still does. There were circumstances over the years where I was unable to be with my family during intense periods of grief, and Forrest was a monolith for them when I could not be.

My brother has provided me with many gifts, but the greatest of them all has been the ability to speak for yourself, and to ask questions. The same advice I had mentioned previously. Forrest has what some would consider an ‘iron tongue’; direct, brilliant, and occasionally brutal in his way of speaking on certain things. I have never seen anyone debate or contradict like him. A personally researched, thoughtful, and brutally honest argument for any question at any point from any direction. I don’t always agree with him, but he possesses an honesty for himself and his beliefs that I might never come to know myself. In a world that is plagued by groupthink, blinded by the media, and failing entirely on communicating peacefully with each other, I see a man in my brother that refuses to paint an idyllic picture for this kind of world, but instead an honest one. In a society that claims to be honest, we are anything but.

I admire this in my brother, ‘admire’ being a weak word for what I truly mean. And I’ve observed and learned from him myself in being relentless in what I believe to be true. Yet alongside these qualities he has, he shows great kindness. He has an unparalleled gentleness to the way he loves others. A heart so large that as his sister, I believe all too many are entirely undeserving of the love he tries to give. The qualities he possesses, some completely opposite to one another, are so deeply rare to be contained in one human being, but they are in him. Forrest has imprinted on my life, and continues to do so, in a way that I believe no other will ever again. And every challenge I have personally encountered or overcome, has been influenced in some way by him.

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Image Credits

Joel Carpenter