But Did You Die Though?
Less "rising from the ashes," more "showing up on Monday."
We’ve been thinking a lot about survival lately. Not the cinematic kind, where you crawl out of a burning building covered in soot and immediately discover your true purpose in life. We had the much less glamorous kind on our mind: answering emails while falling apart, making rent, going to work after a terrible week, remembering to eat, pretending you’re fine because you simply cannot be bothered to explain the alternative. It’s the kind of survival that doesn’t immediately make sense, and processing it isn’t straightforward – more often than not, it leaves you wondering ‘what the hell was all that for?’
There’s a lot of pressure to make survival meaningful. You survived, therefore you grew. You suffered, therefore you became stronger. You lost something, therefore you found yourself.
But at the most basic level, survival means you go through something and you don’t end up dead.
Beyonce once said, “I'm a survivor, I'm not gon' give up, I'm not gon' stop, I'm gon' work harder” which is beautiful. But sometimes we don’t live up to Beyonce’s standards, and survival just means you got through it without any fanfare. Sometimes it means you had to become someone you didn’t particularly like. Sometimes it means something in you had to die, and nobody noticed because you still showed up on Monday. We are the meaning makers of our lives, and sometimes our figuring out whatever-the-fuck that was about is like trying to interpret the Voynich Manuscript.
We wanted to make an issue about that version of survival. The mundane one. The private one. The one that happens when nobody is watching, that we are still trying to make sense of. This kind of survival that isn’t a girl power anthem, it's one whose side effect is the exhaustion of always having to adapt, recover, reinvent yourself and somehow remain employable throughout the process.
The pieces in this issue touch on the quiet weight of being stuck in survival mode. Some metabolized their suffering to make meaning and add it to their personal saga – like Nath Tavares who wrote a whole album after surviving corporate hell. Others hesitate to find a point in their suffering because to them, that feels like saying it’s OK it happened. For them, the trauma wasn’t worth the character development.
Survival isn't always about getting through something and becoming better for it. Sometimes it's just about continuing living. Making dinner, paying the bill, leaving the house, calling someone back, waking up and, despite everything, deciding you're still here. Even Beyonce at the end of the day was just focused simply on just continuing on.
“Thought that I would self-destruct, but I'm still here.
Even in my years to come, I'm still gon' be here”
Which isn't particularly glamorous. But maybe it doesn’t need to be.
Welcome to the Survival Issue.