I can confidently say that this was the most difficult, most mentally gruelling, most grit-inducing, anger-producing, mind-bruising, and confidence-losing project that I have ever done and… I can’t be more proud of it. My task for this second to the final project of my second to last year in high school was to discover the lessons and inspiration from the stories of adversity that have been faced. We focused on four central vocabulary words, hope, resilience, survival, and adversity.
I tried to create something new in these definitions. Something novel. But that made things so difficult when trying to connect with words that have such diverse meanings. As humans, we like to categorize things and put them into boxes, but what I discovered in this process is that the categorization of experience and story is not possible. I think that’s where I first went wrong.
Our final product would be a video to answer the driving question: What lessons and inspiration can we draw from the stories of individuals and communities that have faced tragedy and overcome adversity? the project would be based on the central idea of hope and would be based on the stories of adversity at a field school in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. I decided not to go, and those of us that stayed at home were to pull these lessons and stories from the resources we had here. Like defining the terms above, it wasn’t easy to come up with an idea I felt good about. I spent a lot of time just simply thinking about this part. I would go up to my room close the door and tell myself that I could not leave until I felt good about the idea I had. It was a dumb idea. After 2 hours of skipping between ideas, I realized that I had no clue what this feeling of assurance would even look like let alone feel like. My objective was as unproductive as it sounds: to think. Unfortunately, I realized this fact after I left the room (at least I had one discovery) and by then it was time to start studying for the chem test the next day. That’s what I mean when I say mentally gruelling because I let like I was being forced to climb a wall that was actually a ceiling. As I mentioned in my last project, time can be a catalyst but it can also be a bit of a b**** (I didn’t actually use that word) and when you are trying to climb that wall, and you have no clue why it’s above, it only makes it more impossible when all you can do is say “why are you so flat” and walk away. Read my previous post for this project and you’ll see exactly what I mean when I say that confidence wasn’t on my side. The point of the post was to define a story of hope yet somehow I found myself philosophizing thinking and what it means to “mean”. Honestly, I sounded pretty cool, but as my feedback stated, I had no clear answer, no clear representation of my understanding, and no clear evidence that I thought about the answer to the question that was posed. Thinking about it now, that was all because I had no clarity.
This lack of clarity wove itself through the fabric of my thinking and although I extended my learning through every opportunity I could get, I had not extended my understanding from the ideas and thoughts I had at the start of this project. Yet… I had. I learned so much about myself, my relationships to stories of adversity, how I empathize with them, sympathize with them, and how I try to rationalize them. I learned that thinking is useless without parameters and guiding questions, and I learned what it means to be a human, and what life can be for different people. I was angry at people, and I was all the while so humbled by the power that we have even when there is no power at all.
I began the video-making process weeks late, delayed by the tardiness of my storyboard and screenplay. The process required grit because after my 3rd thesis, my second screenplay, and my second storyboard, I realized that it was going to take a lot more than thinking to get this project done. In a time when all my other classes seemed to sponge every tick of the clock up, it was going to take a relentlessness and a blind drive to get me through to something I felt proud of. I say blind because even after my storyboard and screenplay were both done, I still had a sinking feeling of failure in my ability to create a conclusion that would make me feel content.
Reflecting on this past year, I feel quite frustrated at the fact that I have not found the “easy way through”. I feel like by grade 11, the only hard work should be making, and all the thinking and standard project procedure should be second nature, yet every time, that same resistance hits me. The resistance makes me feel like the path I am taking for the project is wrong and that there is an answer just out of reach. It’s angering to constantly be the judge to the case between intuition and perfectionism. And yet I can’t help but look fondly at the resistance I have shown. For every project, I manage to do while maintaining my high standards by finding the reality of my thinking. In the video-making process, I made draft after draft after draft, constantly scrapping and pushing new ideas for how I wanted to tell the story. I did not want to continue because I knew that what I was creating would be unsatisfactory to me moments after I completed the change. I lost confidence that I would ever complete it but I continued. I remembered defining survival as the will to continue even if there is a visible end, and as I sat glossy-eyed and couch-ridden editing a five-minute video, for a high school class, I discovered, well.. nothing, because I didn’t know why I wanted to feel so confident in the video, why I forced myself into the wee hours of the night to make a draft that I knew would not be satisfactory, and why I was able to, somehow watch my final video and feel proud.
What I realized at the moment is that I can feel bad about something, I can feel frustrated, but I can also pick up a pebble and throw it at the wall that’s a roof above me and piece by piece chip it away until there is no more wall-roof to climb. I realized that it can be really difficult to know when good is good enough, and when looking for greatness is worth it. I guess it doesn’t really matter, one choice does not determine the fate of another.
Hi Ryder,
Glad to see that you stayed with this “penultimate” project on Stories of Hope. I like what you wrote about the challenge of knowing “when good is good enough, and when looking for greatness is worth it.” I can relate…
There’s this aphorism that I might think of now and again that goes ‘not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.’ At times, this seems to be some good advice. There are often opportunity costs in play; and, still, it does get tricky when creativity meets the frequent busyness of our schedules.
And, I agree that relying on categorizations, although useful, can be limited, especially, if doing so obscures the interconnectedness and co-arising of life’s dance. I’d suggest, too, that categorizing is kind of related to scientific reductionism in that both methods begin to miss-represent the truly meaningfully complex picture.
Well, nice job interviewing Hamed for your video focusing on the experiences of refugees. It must be very difficult not being able to see his family for so long. Political strife really does cause tremendous heartache.
So, I’d offer, Ryder, that it takes a lot of confidence and a sense of direction and purpose to engage with someone in this journalistic way as you did, particularly when personal and emotional experiences are being expressed.
You know, it’s not easy to imagine how it would be to lose some of the freedoms that I have always known, and, thus, in a way, I can easily take them for granted. I can be thankful that many liberties continue to be preserved within our societies and that we have representative government.
I value how you identify and narrate that “these stories reveal the power of home, of community, and of the memories and hopes we hold for the future.” Also, as I’m understanding your meaning, I like how you perceive hope as moving and enduring across the generations.
Also, I do believe that a sense of belonging is quite essential for human flourishing. Do you agree?
And, thank you for shining a light on the power of joy even in the midst of adversity and for pointing out that “we don’t have to face adversity on our own.” Again, well done : )