Resilient am I by Da'Vee

Resilient am I by Da'Vee - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

When you let failure convince you to quit trying, that’s when the real trouble starts: when you give up, when you start doing nothing and just forget about it. When you stop trying, I think the biggest thing I learned in high school is resilience and how to keep up with the hard work. I learned that resilience is the key to success.

I learned resilience through school and the things that I like to do. Have you heard of “artist’s block”? When you want to create, but you can’t come up with what you want to draw, write, or create next. I also Have gotton critize for my work looking like a child made it. Then there’s the frustration, lack of motivation, and the temptation to quit. I’ve seen it all through the creation of artwork, writing stories, and writing songs. When I get stuck, I have learned to find another way forward instead of giving up immediately.

I look to make my writing clearer and stronger if a story doesn’t work. If I can’t come up with what to write in a song, I think more about my emotions and my experiences and how I see the world. Drawing is probably the toughest because there are days when I stare at what I’m creating and have no idea what I’m going to do next. I have discoragement to quit or that it's trash with that to. But struggle builds character, I come back to it and try something else. Moreover, that persistence has helped me grow as a person and ultimately challenge myself with AP Art. If I go back to where I started and realize how difficult it was to get started, then I don’t lack the skill to get better at it because I’m not.

I have learned to keep that mindset in school and soccer. There have been hard classes, homework I didn’t know right away, bad games, and times when I wondered if all that work was worth it. Soccer, particularly, has taught me that improvement doesn’t come instantaneously. You practice, make mistakes, lose games, get knocked off the ball, and come back ready to try again. School is the same for me. When something is difficult, I remind myself that I may need to work harder, ask for help, change my approach or give myself more time.

And I think resilience means being resilient; you don’t make it up, and you stay so strong and keep going no matter how emotionally and physically tired you become. To me that is not resilience; that is overworking yourself. A break is not the same as giving up. Nevertheless, that’s the way they’re able to do it: they do it so well because they know they feel better and they know they are in the right place to do it. I have learned that the same idea is true in school, art, and life. I'll have to stop (sometimes), breathe, and ask for help or take a break and come back ready to try again.

And life is going to be tough, and I will face more than artist’s block or a challenging project. I can’t control what type of issues will come my way but I can control how I respond to them. Resilience, to me, is the way one says, “I CAN get through this,” and knowing that asking for help or taking a break does not make me weak. High school taught me that struggling is okay, resting is okay and even failing sometimes is okay. I may never know what comes next, but I am not going to let one difficult moment decide where my story ends.