Adversity: The Art Of Resilience

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Both adversity and resilience occur on spectrum. Adversity; from feeling a need to prove a point to abuse, resilience; none being so resilient that one becomes arrogant, closed-minded, and insensitive. Hara Estroff Morano outlines and informs about resilient people in her article “The Art of Resilience”. The boy from “Untitled” by anonymous is not resilient in any way; W. D. Wetherell in “The Bass, The River, and Sheila Mant” is the “prime example” of someone who is resilient; and Jacques Lusseyran in “The Blind in Society” is the extreme resilient.

The boy from “Untitled” crumbles when faced with adversity; he is not resilient at all. Before he would draw; “and it wasn’t anything”, and he would stare into the sky; “It would be only him and the sky and the things inside him

that needed saying”(Anonymous). But his teacher ridicules him; telling him to be “Like all the other boys”(Anonymous). After this adult; a teacher no less, who “knows everything” mentions these things, he begins to listen. He is a child; and as Morano explains, “People do seem to differ in their inborn ability to handle life’s stresses”(5). Not all are born with an innate ability to protect themselves from all the kinds of adversities life holds. As stated before, he is a child; he is told to listen to authority and behave. He has not “cultivated” the proper mindset or experiences to know that even authority and adults can be wrong(5). Now when he looks at the sky it is, “big and blue and full of everything, but he wasn’t anymore… he was like everyone else”(Anonymous). under the pressure of everyone questioning his differences he falls apart; just trying to please everyone, like a good boy.
Many are born resilient and can deal with adversity well. W. D. Wetherell tells the story of how he was faced with a hard decision, chose wrong, and learned from it. One of the things that resilience develops and draws from is self esteem; “resilience seems to develop out of the challenge to maintain self-esteem”(Morano 6). Wetherell is a boy with a passion for fishing. However when the girl he likes makes a comment on how she thinks, “fishing’s dumb,” he begins to second-guess himself (Wetherell 38). He starts trying to hide who he really is; feeling insecure. Along with this he has to chose between his passion and a girl, choosing wrongly. Wetherell is not discouraged though, by “perceiving bad times as a temporary state of affairs”(Morano 5). He moves on quickly realizing that; “there would be other sheila mants”(Wetherell 39). He also learns; “I never made that mistake again”(39). A large part of life is making mistakes and learning; being resilient by overcoming these obstacles. When one is faced with too many adversities they can become arrogant, insensitive, and closed-minded.
Jacques Lusseyran is faced with obstacle after obstacle, he becomes resilient; too resilient.

Lusseyran develops excessive amounts of “survivor’s pride”(Morano 7). He boasts about his blindness. How “barely ten days after the accident that blinded me”, he made a basic discovery; unlike most people who take longer (Lusseyran 56). Basic discoveries are not all that he claims to have made quickly; he also boasts about all the “great discoveries” he makes (57). He becomes arrogant and insensitive of others’ own struggles. He thinks that if he can survive being blind and the Holocaust then others can conquer their small problems. Being so closed-minded he thinks things such as; “If someone does not accept this explanation, which is the only correct one… he does not know the all-important truth”(63). One of the techniques that Morano brings up for reframing is to see “how heroic your acts were as a child”(7). Lusseyran takes this to heart; seeing himself as a true hero who should “show the world”(64). He does not take into account that, yes he is strong and resilient but, he is not the most important or only person in the world who has faced

adversities.
Everyone faces adversities, but everyone deals with them differently. Some can not be resilient, for most it is a challenge that can be faced, and for others resilience comes so easy it becomes negative.