Resilience: Yet Still….She Prevails

“Challenges are as inevitable as aging.  Yet it is how we choose to face those challenges that determines how well we age in life.”

This painting personifies the human characteristic of resilience.  The female figure, exposed both literally and figuratively, is  my depiction, as an artist, of what resilience has looked and felt like in my life.  The painting was completed back in 2017.  At that time, it had been a couple of years since I stood in front of a canvas with paintbrush in hand.   It was one of those times in life’s normal ups and downs that I was in its valley and finding solace at my easel felt like the right thing to do.  As I began brushing on the neutral background, not really sure what I was going to paint yet, I began reflecting on my life.  Letting my mind get lost in my thoughts, entranced by the repetitive motion of the brush slowly covering the white canvas, I realized how vulnerable I currently felt.  I could remember other times in the past when I felt the same way.  But it never lasted.  I always found a way to stand back up.  I knew this time would be no different.  

This painting is a reminder of a specific time in my past as a single mother.  One of the more difficult times that I can remember.  I didn’t make much money and to say the budget was tight is putting it lightly.  I lived off one dollar Banquet frozen dinners, back when they were only a dollar.  I had two children, worked as a schoolteacher, and received no child support at the time.  I felt as though I were living in a vicious circle not knowing how to escape.  Every night I would stay up late just to rise early the next morning.  Completely drained of energy, I would literally crawl from my bed that I shared with my two kids and struggle to start the new day.  But it was here, in the dark, during those early mornings, on the floor of our one-bedroom apartment where I learned about resilience.  At the time, I didn’t realize that is what it was.  All I knew was that I had to remember my reason for why I needed to find the strength to stand up.  I crawled, and I cried, and I begged and bargained with God and the Universe for something, anything, to change.  In the end, I always stood.  I would remember my Why.  This painting of Resilience is a reminder of that strength.