Resilience And Adversity: Jim Carrey

Resilience & Adversity

Resilience is defined as someone's individual ability to successfully adapt to life tasks in the face of a social disadvantage or highly adverse conditions. Adversity is a difficult or unpleasant situation as in family or relationship problems, health complications or workplace and financial worries. Adversity is almost always in everyone's life and it can be quite hard to overcome, so having some skills to help take back a bit of control would help greatly. One it is having the right mindset, you're thoughts are are essential, they frame your victories and tragedies of your life. Getting past adversity requires a change in your beliefs about challenges. It is not about what happens to you, but how you respond that
is important. Also be aware of, and accept that adversity is inevitable in life and you can't avoid or resist it. Another is to have faith/hope, it takes more energy to live a life full of fear than to live one full of hope. To have faith is to convince yourself to embrace change. You can either live in hope or fear, and when your desire to overcome becomes greater than your fear, you'll overcome come adversity easier. Fear will always attempt to immobilize you, while faith and hope is designed to energize you.
I have chosen Jim Carrey as the person to write about and represent resilience and adversity.
He is a well know actor, comedian, impressionist, screenwriter and producer, and mostly remembered by his highly energetic slapstick performances. Carrey first gained recognition in 1990 after landing a recurring role in the sketch comedy television series In Living Color. His first leading roles in major productions came with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Dumb and Dumber (1994), The Mask (1994), and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995), as well as a supporting role in Batman Forever (1995) and a lead role in Liar Liar (1997). He then starred in The Truman Show (1998) and Man on the Moon (1999), with all that earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. In the 2000s, he gained further recognition for his portrayal of the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), as well as Bruce Almighty (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) for which he was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), Yes Man (2008), Horton Hears a Who! (2008) and A Christmas Carol (2009). In the 2010s, he has starred in Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
(2013).
Jim had a rough start in life, in his early years at school he describes himself as quiet and having no friends.
Yet, he discovered that he could make friends by making people laugh, that was his turning point. At home, he would thoroughly enjoyed making faces and mimicking in his mirror. It wasn’t all great for Jim though. First, he had to work around his learning disability, dyslexia, in order to succeed in school. He did this by developing a phenomenal memory. Money was another problem, his family lived in a rough district with lots of low-rent townhouses. By the tenth grade, he was trying to juggle eight-hour night shifts at the factory with school during the day. He was so exhausted that he couldn’t understand what his teachers were talking about. He didn’t have any friends at school and feared that anyone getting close might find discover his embarrassing poverty. With little learning and no relationships, he felt that school was getting him nowhere. He quit school at 16. His family decided that their surroundings were taking them the wrong direction, so they packed up and moved to Canada with no job in sight. His parents and two siblings lived in a beat-up yellow Volkswagen camper van for a full eight months, parking in campgrounds. With the loss of his teen years, feeling intellectually backward, the embarrassment and hardship of poverty - you could tell he had a lot of emotional baggage . Yet, perhaps that feeling of inferiority paved the way to his success by
making him feel that he had to try harder than others. His first public performance was in Toronto’s Yuk-Yuk Comedy Club and when he wasn’t doing anything in Hollywood, he would drive up and sit in his car on Mulholland Drive, look out at the city, stretch out his arms, and say, “Everyone wants to work with me. I’m a really good actor. I have all kinds of great movie offers.” He would repeat these things over and over, convincing himself that he had a couple of movies lined up. Carrey’s optimism and tenacity eventually paid off, and by 1995, after the huge box office success of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber, his asking price had risen to $20 million per picture.
Adversity happens to anyone, any time, anywhere, but you just need enough resilience to help you push through it. Using your skills you have learnt and having friends that can help you makes it easier. Just like Jim Carrey, he went through diffcuilt times yet that helped form him into the person he is today.