Resilience In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

“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 it and try to put something together that is good” — Elizabeth Edwards. Becoming resilient is not an easy thing to do, because it takes mental strength and time. For example, in the book Once by Morris Gleitzman, a fictional story, Felix the protagonist is a Jewish boy who was able to stay strong despite all the hardships he faced. Felix becomes resilient by putting others before himself which helped him get over the many struggles he was faced with.

Walls suggested that they dig it up and plant it near the house so it would have the same outcome. Rosemary, their mother, was displeased with the idea, she said, “‘You’d be destroying what makes it special’ ... ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it it’s beauty.’” (Walls, 38). Rosemary was essentially saying that the scraggly, permanently twisted, tortured position of symbolized the tree’s perseverance which was the tree’s beauty. One night while driving, Rosemary and their father got in an argument over how long Rosemary had been pregnant. Rosemary, exasperated, gets out of the car and runs off into the dessert, in which their father chases her, with the car. The bystanders, or the children, just readied themselves for the unforeseeable. Walls says, “Lori, Brain, and I braced one another with our arms, like we always did when Dad went on some wild chase that we knew would get bumpy.” (Wall, 42). To Walls her siblings represented a stronghold and force only achieved by being together. Something they did not experience much in their dysfunctional family. So, for persevering together the children were able to gain and benefit from a little bit of stability in their hectic life. This applies to a wide variety of reader that have sibling and can relate to the feeling of needing your siblings to be able to accomplish or get through a situation or

Author Jeanette Walls is an example of someone who has preserved and made something of herself despite the fact that she has a less-than-normal childhood. Her parents Rose Mary and Rex Walls struggled at time to parent efficiently, as shown in Jeannette Walls’ memoir of her childhood The Glass Castle. In the recalling of her unique and sometimes disturbing childhood, Walls paints a picture of inadequate parenting, dangerous techniques used on her siblings and herself, and events that may have inflicted permanent damage on the Walls children. Not only Jeannette, but her other siblings Brian, Lori, and Maureen Walls were also negatively affected by the way they were raised and the things that happened to them under their parent’s watch. Rose

Colson Whitehead once said, “Let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things”. In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” author Jeannette Walls faces despair and turmoil as a result of her impoverished and dysfunctional upbringing. As Jeannette grows up, she watches her father Rex fail to reach his full potential and his dream to build a Glass Castle shatter as his alcoholism takes control. Aware of the devastation her father was causing, she begins to slowly lose faith in him but doesn’t fail to escape her destructive household and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist. Due to her parent’s lack of parenting and being forced to fend for herself, Jeannette developed a sense of responsibility to care for others and make amends to improve the family’s lifestyle. Despite the turbulence and destruction her parents had caused over the years, unlike her father, Jeannette was able to find the strength to overcome obstacles, developing characteristics that ultimately lead her to achieving her dream, thus illustrating that adversity has the power to shape one’s identity.

As flames engulfed her dress, they burned down her stomach as she screamed for help. This was the first memory Jeannette Walls had in The Glass Castle . The plot of the story reveals her childhood of poverty as she moved around the country with her delusional family. Her alcoholic father and mentally ill mother created a very different lifestyle for their children, and raised them like no other. The unique plot, strong characters, and many settings make the novel successful. In this autobiography, she perseveres through tough times and leads the reader down the path she took to adulthood.

In The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls was faced with many life changing and hard obstacles. Many people who have read this book think that these hardships have helped her later in life. Her parents were never there for her when she was growing up. Her dad was a raging alcoholic who spent all of his money away at the bars. Her mom was intelligent, but still never seemed to help much with Jeanette and her siblings. Even though her parents were not much help, she loved them the same no matter what. When Jeanette was younger, she was constantly bullied at her new schools, but never went home and told on the kids her had beat her up. She stood up for herself even if she knew she had no chance at winning the fight. This showed how brave and strong

Individuals can be seen responding to the circumstances they endure in many different ways. The way they choose to respond to issues can determine whether the effect of their exposure will end up to be a positive strengthen to their character. In the memoir The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls, we see the effects of past experiences on Jeannette and we see how she uses those situations to shape the person that she becomes. Jeannette is a focal point to the life of success that a person can live even after growing up in an unorthodox family. She goes to prove that even with the strangest life she lives, she had the passion to pursue her goals is significant and her desire achieves the life she wants while her dreams were being

In the memoir The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls, the main character explains her life story and all the struggles she went through. Along with herself, other characters such as her father Rex Walls and her mother Rose Mary Walls played vital roles to the successful memoir. The settings in this story added a deeper meaning and helped readers better understand the context. Lastly, the themes that the memoir conveyed were extremely important life lessons that shaped Jeannette Walls into the person she is today. Without the strong characters, settings, and themes, the story would not be as successful as it has become.

Everyone knows that some people can paint and draw better than others and you can also be artistic in many different styles. Resilience can be described in the same way, some are more resilient than others and many people have different ways of expressing resilience. Elizabeth Edwards lists a couple of different ways people can be resilient, "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 is good". In the book 'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls each character shows a different way to be resilient and how their resilience impacted their lives.

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.

In her memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls explains all the hardships she faced when growing up. Walls unfortunately had deleterious parents and this caused her to lose her childhood innocence quickly. Jeannette Walls, along with her siblings: Lori, Brian, and Maureen, all had to find ways to ultimately care and protect themselves.

Resiliency is the ability to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. Synonyms include flexible, pliable, and supple. Anna Harrington, in her article, Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way (2012), nailed it! I own many of same beliefs about resiliency and from my experiences, this relationship with one’s self, is ever changing. It is dynamic, in many instances, as Anna Harrington (2012) explained, feeds off our environment. A clique saying that helps me in this matter is not to focus on what I can not control but to focus only on what I can. Just how Harrington mentioned looking yourself in the mirror and analyzing your self, sometimes you must look in that same mirror and simply accept your circumstances,

There are many ways to define resilience. Michael Neenan describes it as “the ability, in the face of difficulty, to retain flexible cognitive, behavioural and emotional responses” (2009). Similarly, the American Psychological Association offers this definition: “Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors” (Comas-Diaz, Luthar, Maddi, O'Neill, Saakvitne & Tedeschi, n.d.). While the definitions abound, one thing is clear: resilience is all about being able to “bounce back” after a difficult experience. Importantly, resilience is unique from coping in that it

Resilience is described as a quick recovery after a rough event or situation. The second meaning given is more on an physical capacity in where an object recovers it’s shape after physical encounter. This second definition adds even more meaning to this word. Image a rubber ball being hit with a bat, if observable in slow motion, it can be appreciated how the rubber ball losses it’s rounded shape but after the physical contact is over, the ball recover it’s initial shape. Just like the rubber ball, behaves resilience in some individuals. In my end, I have solidify my resilience from one event to another. Coming from a not very functional family I have learn effective coping mechanism to my own person, they may be not the most adequate but they