Resilience: The Fire Within
“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.” -Joshua Graham. Life is full of obstacles, some better than others and the ability to overcome a traumatic and abusive event in one’s life is defined as resilience. Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; to reflect toughness after an unpleasant life changing events. Colson Whitehead author of The Underground Railroad shows resilience through characters such as Cora, Mabel, and Caesar. All characters encountered cruel and horrific events throughout their lives and would overcome them, allowing themselves to seek opportunities in life. Some other examples of resilience were through Ping Fu and myself who have also suffered through some traumatic situations.
Mabel unlike her mother shows resilience by running away, leaving Cora behind. Perhaps she was trying to break the pattern and find a better life so that she could come back and free Cora. After all, knowing the cruel punishment that was executed upon the runaways would be more gruesome then abandoning your child to the planation life. As an illustration, when Big Anthony was caught they made
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Huffington Post: An Inspirational True Story of Resilience and the American Dream by MeiMei Fox, tells her remarkable traumatic story about the ten years she faced of near-starvation, abuse, child labor, and soldier during the Cultural Revolution in China. But, “Ping never let these bitter experiences defeat her.” Remarkedly, Ping Fu is now the founder and CEO of Geormagic, a software company that is leading the 3D printing and imaging revolution. This is a good example of a person that could overcome their terrible situation by her perseverance and strength, she was able to rise above it all. Surely, Ping Fu found the flame of resilience within herself to change her
Throughout the book Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals, the reader can see that Melba is resilient, resourceful, and clever from how she acts in different situations. Melba has a variety of character traits, and the reader can clearly see them. The book builds the reader’s understanding of Melba’s personality by showing how she reacted to different experiences. There are many examples of her resilience, resourcefulness, and cleverness in the book that the reader should notice. Melba’s resilience is displayed multiple times because of her ability to continue through the pain.
Resilience is displayed through the drive shown by the characters in these stories, despite hardships or trauma in their pasts. In The Road, Papa and the boy continue to move forward and “carry the fire”, staying morally true to themselves, even despite the things they had seen. The boy’s mother shot herself, he has seen cannibalism, slavery, and people reduced to monsters and broken shells of humanity, but he is still fighting and trying to be one of the good guys. He still wants to help the little boy when he meets him, still wants to help Ely when he meets them (McCarty, 162); The Boy still has a desire to help people who are suffering. He is starving, but he wants to give away his food so that the people who are good in this world won’t die.
Resilience in The Break The Break is a novel that has constant conflicts and issues occuring, from mental health issues to addictions and death to gangs, there is always conflict. Many of the characters find a way to deal with this conflict with various skills, one of the most occurring is their quality of resilience. Laura Vermette demonstrates all the seven C’s of resilience - competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control - in her book, The Break, through different characters and situations while showing how individuals would be unable to survive and grow without resilience.
Being resilient in tough situations can be substantial in some cases. To be resilient means one has great wit, especially in a 'finding a way out ' scenario. It can even be the key to survival, as can be shown in a short excerpt from Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. It gives a great example of resilience based off of a situation that Louie Zamperini finds himself and crew in as their plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean. What characteristic is most important in helping Louie survive?
Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls recalls her family’s past and the struggle they went through. She inadvertently teaches the audience her meaning of resilience. But how is resilience defined? In short, resilience is the ability of a person to appreciate what life hands them instead of sulking upon it. A quote by Elizabeth Edwards supports this definition and ties in with Jeannette Walls’ personal experiences.
The determination to live comes from human nature. But the urge of giving up when we come across a difficult problem is also a part of human nature. There a few people in this world that have the characteristics of resilience. As author Kendra Cherry describes them, "People that are able to keep their cool have what psychologists call resilience, or an ability to cope with problems and setbacks" (Source A; Cherry, 1). An example of someone who has the characteristics of resilience is a bombardier name Louis (Louie) Zamperini.
Louie Zamperini was a remarkable man, soldier, and survivor. Growing up a slipshod child in California, Louie learned to push himself on the track. The “Torrance Tornado” was destined for the Olympics. His career was abruptly stopped in 1940 when Adolf Hitler and his regime destroyed the Olympic stadium in Finland. With his dream diminished, he became a bombardier for the U.S. Army during World War II.
ECR: A Long Way Gone In “A Long Way Gone”, Ishmael Beah's journey as a child soldier in Sierra Leone highlights the resilience required to survive in the face of traumatic events. Ishmael Beah's resilience in the face of trauma and adversity shows the importance of hope and determination in overcoming life's challenges. After a devastating attack in his village, Ishmael escapes and struggles for independence. "I ran for my life, my heart pounding, my mind racing.
In my view resilience can sometime be brought on by an emotional event and helps you with self-confidence. Additionally, I feel that resilience means that one can expect things that can happen in a process and can adjust accordingly to the situation at hand. My example of resilience was demonstrated in this TED talk video “My Escape from North Korea” by Hyeonseo Lee, she discusses her life in North Korea and how everything was transparent to her in North Korea as she was growing up until the age of seven. In response to Larry’s claim that” forgiveness is not for the other person,” he presents a poorly inconsistent argument, on several questionable norms, which his evidence is based solely on his life situations.
What does resilience really mean to you? The literal definition to resilience is the ability to cope with problems and setbacks. In the story Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, she shows us all different kind of ways that the characters in her story used the skills that Kendra Cherry was talking about, to help them out of every situation. In this story it shows how certain situations affect people in different ways and how each person goes through seven skills. The characteristic that Louie undergoes is the skill of Strong Problem-Solving.
“No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That's the only way to keep the roads clear.” the wise Greg Kincaid says. This explains resilience and that you can overcome bad situations with hard work and perseverance. In A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, this kind of resilience connects with Beneatha Younger.
Hardy, Concato & Gill (2004) stated that resilient people are those who display “the capacity to remain well, recover, or even thrive in face of adversity”. Masten (2001) as mentioned that they are the ordinary person dealing with the challenges and tragedies of everyday real life. For instance, the response of many Americans to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and individuals’ efforts to rebuild their lives shows their resiliency. Being resilient does not mean that a person does not have or had experience difficulty or distress; the emotional pain and sadness are common but the path to resilience is likely to involve considerable emotional distress. Resilience is not a trait which people either has or do not have whereas it involves
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity or hardship, Debra Oswald was able to express this through the lives of fictitious characters based on real Australian People. She uses themes concerning people marginalised in society, the struggle to achieve one’s dream and the past affect the present, by using these ideas with the diverse cast of characters as well as the range of literary and dramatic techniques, Oswald was able to show how people face adversity and how important it is to have resilience through the engagement of the characters and there development throughout the play. Gary is an average Australian working class man who has been marginalised in society, he lives near the poverty line and struggles everyday to control
However, resilience may also be described as the innate human quality that has not necessarily developed only after big disasters but processed through positive adaptation. A person can be resilient if he/she experience positive life events such as a job promotion, wedding, birth of a new child or having a new pet. These incidents would require the person to perform new roles and responsibilities and he/she can develop resilience to these changes overtime. This is resilience acquired through positive adaption (Fletcher & Sarkar,
According to Masten (2001) “resiliency refers to a class of phenomena characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development” (p. 228). Garmezy (1991) considers the intelligence level of an individual and ability to possess the mind power to tackle an adverse situation as one pleases as the core characteristics of a resilient individual. Garmezy (1991) resiliency framework allows student affairs professionals is to examine the strengths of disadvantaged students who are faced with various life stressors, but