The Day I Realized Stability Can Look Messy

Forests, Disturbance, Resilience, and the psychology of not feeling enough

I still remember one of my early field surveys. The slope was steeper than it looked on the map. My measuring tape kept sliding downhill and every tree seemed determined to grow at an angle that made diameter measurement awkward. I checked the same tree twice because the number didn’t feel right. Then I checked it for a third time, not because the tree had magically changed its position, but because I didn’t trust myself enough. Around me, the forest was doing what forests always do: leaves moving, insects humming, light shifting through the canopy as if everything here understood its role except me. At some point, I realized I was waiting for a feeling, the moment when I would suddenly feel qualified to stand there and measure something that had been growing long before I arrived.

That moment never came.

Some of my early field survey pictures

Years later here I am, doing my PhD, sitting in front of my laptop staring at complex models instead of uneven slopes. I recognized the same feeling, the same uncertainty. Some days I open a research paper and everything makes sense, other days I reread the same paragraph several times and feel slightly out of step with it. On those days, I feel less capable than I probably am. I doubt myself, underestimate what I know, and quietly return to the same question: do I really belong here?

Psychologists call this The Impostor Syndrome “the experience of doubting one’s abilities despite clear evidence of competence (Clance & Imes, 1978)”. The defining feature is not lack of achievement, but hesitation to fully trust it.

For a long time, I thought the answer to that question would come from experience — more papers read, more models run, more years spent in academia. Instead, it began to appear somewhere unexpected — in the same forests where I once felt unsure of myself.

When people talk about climate change, droughts, windstorms, insect outbreaks, and shifts in forest regeneration, forests are usually mentioned gently, almost politely. They are helpful. Important even. But rarely central. Yet decades of research show trees play a major role in regulating forest ecosystems. Real solutions, we’re told, are technological, economic or political. Trees are supportive actors in the background. Yet the data says something stranger. Globally, forests absorb a large fraction of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions each year through photosynthesis and biomass accumulation (Pan et al., 2011). Even after disturbances, ecosystem processes often continue rather than collapse (Thom & Seidl, 2016). Forest ecosystems rarely remain static. Growth slows, species composition shifts, and structure reorganizes after disturbance, but function persists. In ecology, this capacity is called resilience, the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while retaining its function (Holling, 1973). Canopy gaps increase light availability, deadwood becomes habitat for fungi and insects, and new cohorts establish in the altered conditions. Disturbance is therefore not only destructive, but it is also a driver of biodiversity and ecosystem renewal (Seidl et al., 2017). The deeper I dived into it, the more familiar it felt.

A forest does not look stable while recovering. It looks messy, uneven and incomplete. But function continues underneath the visible disturbance.

Some of my favorite forest ecosystems in Himachal Pradesh (India): Left: Western Himalayan temperate conifer forest — , Kinner Kailash Range, Chitkul Right: Himalayan montane temperate broadleaf-conifer forest — Dhauladhar Range, Dharamshala

That realization eventually shaped the research I now work with. In my PhD, I study how forests persist through disturbance. Imagine a forest as a living system — almost like a city made of trees. Some cities are tidy and managed, and some are very old neighborhoods where nature has been in charge for hundreds of years. In my research, I visit many of these forests across the Czech Republic and watch how they change over time. But forests grow slowly, much slower than a human lifetime and we cannot simply wait 200 years to see the future. So to solve this, I built a virtual forest with the help of a process-based forest landscape model called iLand. You can think of it as a simulation where each tree behaves like a real organism — growing, competing for light, dying, or regenerating. Then I introduce disturbances such as windthrow events, bark beetle outbreaks, and drought stress under different climate scenarios. The model produces time-series outputs such as mortality, regeneration, productivity, etc. Now here comes the interesting part. A forest is not only trees. Many small organisms live there such as mosses, lichens, fungi, insects and moths. They are like the citizens of the city. I try to see how the number and types of citizens change when the forest is disturbed. I will explore how forest attributes (stand age, deadwood carbon, leaf area index, species diversity) influence these taxa and how disturbances reshape their communities. To understand this, I measure ecosystem resilience not simply by whether the forest is damaged, but by how it responds, like measuring the disturbance impact, the speed of recovery, the time needed to regain stability and the cumulative stress the system experiences over time. In other words, my research focuses on the trade-offs between forest biodiversity and resilience to natural disturbances in Central European forests. I will understand how forests reorganize after disturbances while continuing to function.

An Overview of how I am exploring Forest Resilience

While studying this forest dynamics, I began to see my own uncertainty differently. I had assumed difficulty meant inadequacy, but forest research shows something different. Disturbances reshape forests and influence how the next generation develops and recovers (Hlásny et al., 2021). Forests rarely return to a perfect previous state after disturbance. Growth slows, structure shifts, species reorganize, yet the system continues functioning. Stability, I learned, is not the absence of change but continuity through it.

Learning feels similar. We admire breakthroughs and undervalue persistence. Somewhere in that pattern, I recognized something familiar. Impostor syndrome lives in the gap between becoming capable and recognizing it. We expect confidence to arrive with knowledge, but it often comes later, quietly catching up to what we already know.

Working with forests is slowly reshaping how I measure my own worth. I often underestimate myself, expecting certainty before allowing confidence. Yet a forest does not measure success by immediate stability, but by surviving disturbance and continuing to grow. Recovery is not linear rather it is adaptive (Seidl et al., 2017). Forests stabilize the ecosystems without knowing their own importance, and perhaps people grow the same way. And maybe that is the quiet reassurance in all of this — that doubt, fear, or any label we carry does not disqualify us. Growth still happens through effort and persistence, and everyone deserves the chance to become visible in their own time.

I am still learning, still reorganizing. I think my moment will come and that day I might quietly realize I belonged all along.

Lastly, if you’ve come this far dear readers - thank you for reading the thoughts of a mind still learning how to grow.

References

Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006

Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245

Hlásny, T., Dobor, L., Rammer, W., & Seidl, R. (2021). Disturbance legacies and forest resilience under climate change. Forest Ecology and Management, 491, 119193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2021.119193

Pan, Y., Birdsey, R. A., Fang, J., et al. (2011). A large and persistent carbon sink in the world’s forests. Science, 333(6045), 988–993. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1201609

Seidl, R., Thom, D., Kautz, M., et al. (2017). Forest disturbances under climate change. Nature Climate Change, 7, 395–402. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3303

Thom, D., & Seidl, R. (2016). Natural disturbance impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity in temperate and boreal forests. Biological Reviews, 91(3), 760–781. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12193