Drawing ‘Resilience’ Out of a Hat

How an assignment in 8th grade affected the rest of my life!

Photo by erica steeves on Unsplash

I feel I had a pretty great childhood. I was the daughter of a general contractor and a retail manager. I was the second child of four kids. I was born in Colorado, where I lived in incredible Breckenridge until I was six, then we moved to Tampa, Florida. Both amazing places.

Other than wrecking a bike on the gutters, or chasing our wild, escape artist pet husky on the golf course, or the random eight-foot water moccasin in the back yard that Grandpa had to kill with just a shovel, we really didn’t have any issues growing up.

Then, in 8th grade, my teacher gave our class a project where we all had to draw one character trait out of a hat, and write do a report on what that trait means. I remember being the last one to draw and watched people’s happy faces as they drew “leadership”, “integrity”, and “strength”. I thought, “What am I going to be left with? All of the good ones have been drawn!” Then it was my turn… I reached my hand into the hat and drew out my trait…

RESILENCE

“What is that?” I thought silently. I had never even heard of that word, and let me remind you, this was not the days of the world wide web. I wasn’t able to grab a handheld device that could bring me instant gratification by typing in a few letters and hitting a button. No… I had to wait until I got home, go to a bookshelf, find our heavy, red with gold binding, Merriman Webster’s 3.5 inches thick dictionary and look up the word the old fashioned way.

Resilience (noun): re-sil-ience

1: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape and deformation caused especially by compressive stress

2: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change (Merriam Webster’s definition)

Hmmm… interesting, but lame! I wanted to write my report on Leadership instead. “Why did I have to draw this stupid word?” my young twelve-year-old self thought, and I got to work on my assignment.

That was 8th grade. Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school. Things were going well! I was an honor student with plants to go to the Air Force Academy; I had the…