The Glass Castle: Human Resilience Resilience is a skill that you develop over time through your experiences. People with this quality are able to gather their strength and keep going even when it seems futile to do so. Human resilience can be defined as the ability to come from your lowest point, back to your highest. It is the ability to get back up even when everything and everyone is pushing you down. Resilience can be expressed in several different ways and different people will have different beliefs on what it means to be resilient. In The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls and her family face numerous trials that require resilience to carry on from. Examples of this quality can be found in both The Glass Castle and in a quote from Elizabeth Edwards. …show more content…
Edward’s says: “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.” (Edwards). This quote from Elizabeth Edwards speaks about how people should respond in the face of adversity and how this response creates a resilient person. A resilient person in the face of adversity will gather their bearings and find a new solution to their original problem. However, people who do not possess this quality are more likely to drop everything and give up. This quote supports my definition because in my definition I state that human resilience is “the ability to come from your lowest point, back to your highest” and Edwards’ quote states that “Resilience is accepting your new reality… and try to put together something that’s good” or in other words, to come back from your low
Resilience, when asked to define and explain the act of being resilient, can be a hard thing to describe. It is something everyone must be at one point in their lives, and what some people must be every day. There are different levels to it, depending on what the person is going through at the time. However, resilience is commonly described as just staying strong in a tough situation or time in a person’s life. When something goes wrong, or something bad happens, the person affected doesn’t let it break them. They stand strong against whatever is being thrown at them, but they bend when they need to. Someone who is resilient is flexible, making sure they don’t crack under pressure. As Robert Jordan said in The Fires of Heaven, “The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
In the past 100 years, America has gone through two world wars, a great depression, and a fluctuating economy—all of which have made us stronger as a nation. Though adversity is a hard thing to over come, it helps our society grow. Would America be the same if we had never gone through the Great Depression? Of course not. There are however, other bouts of adversity that even children can relate to. One may have abusive or alcoholic parents, or even experience death at a young age. I can strongly agree with Horace in that adversity elicits talents, which would have lain dormant in prosperous circumstances. Adversity, summed up, is the long-term hardships and misfortune that guide us into growing as people and as a country.
Resilience is about how an individual deals, resists, recovers and learns from adversity’s in life. If a child is resilient they are less likely to be damaged as a result of negative experiences and are more likely to learn from and move on. In order for a child to be resilient they need to believe in themselves and have others they can rely on in their lives.
Resilience is about being independent, standing on your own two feet or taking back the power.
For some people the strong word resilience can impact one’s life in a significant way. Overall, resiliency is having the ability to still enjoy and continue your life with positive, good times, regardless of a hard past or bad experience. It can be shown in various ways throughout a text, including the setting, the plot, and characterization. This is how the texts, The Other Wes Moore, The Art of Resilience, and The Third and Final Continent share their common theme. This theme the three texts convey is that resiliency is vital for a positive as well as successful life.
Resilience is the power or the ability to return to the original form. “Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range” (94). Father Gregory Boyle says this because he knows that resilience is needed in order to change. Resilience is important because we can become better people by doing things, we thought we couldn’t do. In the book, Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boundless Compassion, by Father Gregory Boyle, resilience is essential in our lives because it is the key to do better.
Saying that, no one person thinks the same, it’s what makes us all unique. Though, I would be pleased to say these tie together to make my definition make sense. The first part of my definition, resilience is the capability of a person to bounce back from a hard time. I fixated on this to explain my life experience in having to be resilient with my family members to get to where we are now. The second parts, to get back on their feet after stumbling, was expressed by Jeannette Walls. Again and again, we seem to notice a pattern in the book where the Walls family move to somewhere new and build a whole life there. They don’t let their past stop them and through the hard times, they still manage to build something new for themselves. The last part, to understand that there is no end and you can always become better, would be from Elizabeth Edwards for support. From her book on resilience, the quote used states that if you are resilient, you’d be able to judge what you can do from there. This connects to my definition because it explains that resilience helps you deal and even become better when you
Reading a book that is similar to The Glass Castle by Jeannette wall can help build a student’s resilience especially if that student is in a tough moment in his/her life. The article The Importance Of Resilience has some what similar problems like The Glass Castle. In the article the author discussed, about a man named Quashone. When Quashone was younger he lived in a bad neighborhood, from living there it lead to some bad decisions that he made. After telling his mom, those bad decisions they moved to a different neighborhood (Gorman, et al). Just by that one change in his life, it turned upside down from getting into trouble to graduating from college and having a family of his own. From reading books that are like The Glass Castle it can teach people, especially students, on how to build resilience accepting support, drive, and hard work.
In the novel The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls there are many moments in which you notice the struggle that the family and family are going through. By constructing this response to the proposed question; it forces you to look deeper into the stories character and see their resilience. Now of course in this novel there were characters that showed very little resilience or never sprung back from the situation they were in at a younger age. In this essay I will be explaining resilience and use examples from The Glass Castle to prove my points.
Resilience is the power or the ability to return to the original form. “Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range” (94). Father Gregory Boyle says this because he knows that resilience is needed in order to change. Resilience is important because we can become better people by doing things, we thought we couldn’t do. In the book, Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boundless Compassion, Boyle claims resilience is essential in our lives because it is the key to do better.
There are varieties of definitions in regards with resilience based on different perspectives (Arrington et al., 2000). For instance, from a developmental perspective, resilience can be defined as positive and successful outcomes despite challenging situations (Masten, 2007; Windle, 2010). Resilience can also be defined as recovery to normal functioning from adversity or coping well under currently risk conditions (Masten, 2007; Windle, 2010). However, not every language has the word “resilience”. For example, a phrase, “the ability to cope with adversity” (Ungar et al.,
Could living a miserable childhood actually beneficial? The Glass Castle is a novel written about the life of the narrator and author, Jeanette Walls. The story illustrates the hardships and experiences of an alcoholic father and delusional mother attempting to raise four children. Jeanette Walls owes her success to her hardships and became the women she is today because of her parents and childhood.
Resilience is a term that is often applied to those who have faced hardship and viewed the experience in a positive light as an opportunity to grow and change for the better (Wagnild & Collins, 2009). The definition however seems to vary from place to place. Ungar et al. (2008) stated “definitions of resilience are ambiguous when viewed across cultures" (p.174) which is why the understanding of resilience may be difficult to capture (as cited in Windle, Bennett & Noyes, 2011). Although the literature agrees on several common themes about resilience there are many varying opinions on how to define the concept or the attributing factors. Earvolino-Ramirez (2007) and
First of all, I would like to define what resilience is. Major scholars believe it is the process to recover from trauma, or the ability to respond to adversity. According to Sergeant and Laws-Chapman (2012), resilience refers to “the ability to adapt to adverse conditions while maintaining a sense of purpose, balance, and positive mental and
During times of difficulty, people are forced to survive and prevail by using specific traits that help them do this. For example in the memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls grows up in an environment that forces her to use certain traits to help her overcome adversity in her childhood. For example, her ability to distract herself from negative situations, her acceptance during tough times, and her constant trust that her parents will only do the best for her, are a few examples of these traits. As the story progresses, Jeanette continually and constantly uses these traits.