Consider the following comments on resilience.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
Proverb
We praise resilience so that we never have to ask why people are forced to be so resilient.
Bouncing back is not the same as healing, and we too often confuse the two.
A river cuts through rock not because of its power but because of its persistence.
Anonymous
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A nuanced reflection might question the cult of resilience: while the capacity to endure is real and valuable, celebrating it can quietly normalise the hardships that demand it. Open with a moment you or someone you know was praised for bouncing back, and the strange hollowness that praise can carry. Develop the genuine strength persistence brings, then complicate it by asking who benefits when we expect people to simply cope. A third move could separate true recovery from mere survival. Caution: do not dismiss resilience as a myth, since the honest reflection holds its worth and its limits together.