Growth & Resilience

Freddy Murphy

Beyond The Blues

To create my piece, I made two roses, one small and one large, to show growth and resilience. When working with the roses, I realized how fragile the petals appeared, but how strong they ultimately proved to be once the clay was set. The small rose represented the starting point, the moment before one rises from adversity, while the large rose represented the aftermath, the point in which people gain strength and confidence once they have overcome an experience, because creating these two roses made me reflect on how growth isn’t something that occurs easily or quickly, but over time with the help of staying resilient. 

Growth, on one hand, and resilience are the most crucial aspects of mental health because growth is the process of developing or advancing in strength, wisdom, or skill, or being able to do something better or more effectively than before, or even better than anyone before, while resilience is the quality that lets one carry on even if one’s life becomes stressful or painful, meaning if one is resilient, one bounces back from the hard experiences rather than letting them define one’s life, which is the key to emotional growth. The two roses effectively illustrate the concept. A small rose is not going to remain small if taken care of: the result will be something greater and lovely. Humans are the same, too. We also will not be the same, staying on the same track with the same versions of ourselves. We will be stronger than we think with the help of time, support, and self-realization, but everything takes time, just like shaping clay. Each petal on the bigger rose had to be made with care, developed slowly, smoothed out, and then arranged carefully. 

The most crucial element about the process of being resilient is the fact that, instead of turning one’s head to the other side to ignore the pain, one must confront the problem or adversity and work with it, even if the process is painful or even painful for one’s pride, because one will realize one’s strengths in situations that bring one out of its comfort zone, which is why the process of resilience is so tightly entwined with one’s state of mind because, if one knows one will survive, one will fear much less the future. The other side of the equation is the recognition that difficulties will be part of the growth process. Real roses always have thorns, but the trick is learning how to keep moving forward, even when one is uncomfortable, or stopping to ask for help, or trying again if one needs to start over from scratch because of a failure. To be resilient is to acknowledge that everything isn’t always going well, but to refuse to be held back by the challenges that are there. 

My roses are an example of this process. The small rose is the start, the point where one may feel vulnerable, uncertain, or overwhelmed. The full, developed rose is the process of working beyond those emotions to develop who one is. The contrast between the sizes illustrates that growth is an actual, measurable process, even if it occurs slowly, or that the process of developing resilience affects the person in deep, long-lasting ways, just as clay will alter once and always after it is fired in the kiln. 

Ultimately, this lesson has taught me that growth is closely tied to resilience, as one cannot exist without the other. Growth is made possible by the challenges that we are able to overcome because of the resilience we build. As we grow, we become more resilient, just like the two roses, which start small in areas of our lives but then bloom into something greater over time. The roses made of ceramics encourage us to think about the fact that even if everything is going from bad to worse, we can always rise, adapt, and develop into better versions of who we are today.