The Car Analogy of Survivorship
The early days of my survival felt like driving a car with a fatal engine flaw, or desperately bald tires. You continue, numbly, unable to look away from the road in front of you. You hear the clunks, smell the bad brakes, but can't afford the time to stop - you have no way to fix them anyway. I once drove from San Francisco to Portland in one night, with my oxy-acetylene tanks wedged behind the driver's seat. Cushioned by some random laundry, they thudded gently against my back every time I made a turn. My tires were bald and all four were leaking steadily, but I had to limp along, because there was nowhere to stop, no money to fix them with, and a show to set up the next day in Portland.
I could only go numbly onward, the rain and the tension narrowing my field of vision into an endless gray highway. Surviving was like that.
Sure, I was aware that there was a bomb wedged behind my head, my tires were bad, the truck drivers on I-5 are not always fond of staying in their lane - but it never once occurred to me to stop. If I acknowledged how ridiculous, dangerous, and futile my position was, I couldn't possibly continue what I was doing. But there was no other option, no resources, and not even the sense of self-preservation required to wonder if I was going to be okay, or to wonder if there was another option.
The next phase of surviving was like lying in a ditch by the side of the road, in total abject despair. The fatal flaws I had at first refused to look directly at sprung to horrible life,
and worse than my darkest fears. Once I looked directly at them and stopped my constant movement away, I realized with an overwhelming sense of desolation that I could never, ever fix anything. I couldn't even make enough sense of the mess to try to start - everything tangled into everything else in a hopeless explosion of wires and bolts.
For me, this happened after my childhood best friend and first love died. After that I had to stop running - after I pushed the hulking mess of my life as far as I could go before it gave out, and I was left with only myself, my terrible coping mechanisms, my disappointments, and my failures. I couldn't force myself to move. It took all of my energy just to live with the images I had in my head, to feel the reality of what had happened, and to know that there was no justice, that all over the world things were as bad as they were for me, and worse - and no one gets to know why.
Why do these things happen? Why do people do these terrible things and get away with it?
Why do good people do nothing? Why do I have no energy even to fight one small part of the battle, let alone the entire long, sad, horrible history of brutal, terrible violence - when
the enemy is a tireless, many-headed monster that knows, knows in every inch of its sick being, that it has the power and I don’t?
The bad guys win, and all you're left with are the pitiful, useless ways you have mutilated yourself to survive.
Then there's a place beyond despair, where you can't feel any worse, so you have nothing left to hide and no one can do anything to you anymore. A place where you can pour out every dark, horrible secret for the world to see, and still drive the hulking, twisted mess of metal and grease forward, on fumes and your own will, because fuck them, and because you don't care if you're doomed, you don't care if you can't win, you're going to drive this
horribly twisted hunk of scrap metal called your life as far into the ribs of the beast as you can. And there will still be monsters who torture little girls, and there will still be a mass of people who will never acknowledge it, and therefore allow it, and your life will be destroyed by everything you've been through, and by everything everyone else has been through, but even still, you will force that hollowed out, welded-together shell FORWARD.
There is a certain uncanny joy in this place. I heard that place in my mom’s voice, when she said, "Let that fucker kill me. I'm doing this anyway." I felt it myself when, calmer and firmer than I have ever been before, I told him, "You are not my father." When everything is scoured away, when you have been hurt beyond your mind's ability to rationalize, when your coping mechanisms fail and everything you shored up around you falls away and you are still facing the beast, you gun it straight fucking forward because there's nothing else to do.
But then something else happens. While you're hauling yourself ever forward, high on your own fatalism, the intricacies of nature keep working around you, weaving their own, tiny, invisible, fragile but relentless connections, healing on their time. The dust and pollen and leaves fall down on the wreck of your life, the mechanics of nature do their work, while you never notice, so wrapped up in your misery, despair, and rage, until something catches
your eye – a tiny form of life, sprouting from the oxidized hulk. It’s confusing, and frighteningly delicate.
You might even rub it away the first time you see it, or the first several times.
But it can't be destroyed entirely. It is eternal in its tiny, gradual steps to life. Once you become aware of this, you are seized by an enormous sense of responsibility. This tiny delicate thing grew where you were convinced nothing could, and you want to protect
it. These little changes and tiny lives become so engaging that you finally grind to a halt, overwhelmed by what you are seeing.
Slowly, you come to realize that there is no forward direction to go, that there never was any finish line - it was never about that. It was always about the way life has of healing itself, so slowly and invisibly it disappears in the noise, but so inevitably it can't ever be scoured away completely. And you figure out that we are living creatures, in a world made of life, and we are simply not built to do anything forever - not even grieve. We change and adapt like everything else.
Even though all the faults and all the horrors are still there, in time you can watch the process of life within yourself break them down into their component parts, extract what nutrients there are, and devote them to new growth.
This becomes the real victory. You can never make yourself fuller of rage and hatred than the source of rage and hatred - you can never go to war hard enough to end war - and it becomes clear that that was never the point. The point is to allow nature, or the source of nature, to take your broken soul and break it down further, break it into its component parts and make something new out of it, let the hurt and the horror go, lay them down for the fertile soil of something altogether different.
Gardens can grow out of scrap-yards and the corpses of monsters.
- Rikki, 2011
I could only go numbly onward, the rain and the tension narrowing my field of vision into an endless gray highway. Surviving was like that.
Sure, I was aware that there was a bomb wedged behind my head, my tires were bad, the truck drivers on I-5 are not always fond of staying in their lane - but it never once occurred to me to stop. If I acknowledged how ridiculous, dangerous, and futile my position was, I couldn't possibly continue what I was doing. But there was no other option, no resources, and not even the sense of self-preservation required to wonder if I was going to be okay, or to wonder if there was another option.
The next phase of surviving was like lying in a ditch by the side of the road, in total abject despair. The fatal flaws I had at first refused to look directly at sprung to horrible life,
and worse than my darkest fears. Once I looked directly at them and stopped my constant movement away, I realized with an overwhelming sense of desolation that I could never, ever fix anything. I couldn't even make enough sense of the mess to try to start - everything tangled into everything else in a hopeless explosion of wires and bolts.
For me, this happened after my childhood best friend and first love died. After that I had to stop running - after I pushed the hulking mess of my life as far as I could go before it gave out, and I was left with only myself, my terrible coping mechanisms, my disappointments, and my failures. I couldn't force myself to move. It took all of my energy just to live with the images I had in my head, to feel the reality of what had happened, and to know that there was no justice, that all over the world things were as bad as they were for me, and worse - and no one gets to know why.
Why do these things happen? Why do people do these terrible things and get away with it?
Why do good people do nothing? Why do I have no energy even to fight one small part of the battle, let alone the entire long, sad, horrible history of brutal, terrible violence - when
the enemy is a tireless, many-headed monster that knows, knows in every inch of its sick being, that it has the power and I don’t?
The bad guys win, and all you're left with are the pitiful, useless ways you have mutilated yourself to survive.
Then there's a place beyond despair, where you can't feel any worse, so you have nothing left to hide and no one can do anything to you anymore. A place where you can pour out every dark, horrible secret for the world to see, and still drive the hulking, twisted mess of metal and grease forward, on fumes and your own will, because fuck them, and because you don't care if you're doomed, you don't care if you can't win, you're going to drive this
horribly twisted hunk of scrap metal called your life as far into the ribs of the beast as you can. And there will still be monsters who torture little girls, and there will still be a mass of people who will never acknowledge it, and therefore allow it, and your life will be destroyed by everything you've been through, and by everything everyone else has been through, but even still, you will force that hollowed out, welded-together shell FORWARD.
There is a certain uncanny joy in this place. I heard that place in my mom’s voice, when she said, "Let that fucker kill me. I'm doing this anyway." I felt it myself when, calmer and firmer than I have ever been before, I told him, "You are not my father." When everything is scoured away, when you have been hurt beyond your mind's ability to rationalize, when your coping mechanisms fail and everything you shored up around you falls away and you are still facing the beast, you gun it straight fucking forward because there's nothing else to do.
But then something else happens. While you're hauling yourself ever forward, high on your own fatalism, the intricacies of nature keep working around you, weaving their own, tiny, invisible, fragile but relentless connections, healing on their time. The dust and pollen and leaves fall down on the wreck of your life, the mechanics of nature do their work, while you never notice, so wrapped up in your misery, despair, and rage, until something catches
your eye – a tiny form of life, sprouting from the oxidized hulk. It’s confusing, and frighteningly delicate.
You might even rub it away the first time you see it, or the first several times.
But it can't be destroyed entirely. It is eternal in its tiny, gradual steps to life. Once you become aware of this, you are seized by an enormous sense of responsibility. This tiny delicate thing grew where you were convinced nothing could, and you want to protect
it. These little changes and tiny lives become so engaging that you finally grind to a halt, overwhelmed by what you are seeing.
Slowly, you come to realize that there is no forward direction to go, that there never was any finish line - it was never about that. It was always about the way life has of healing itself, so slowly and invisibly it disappears in the noise, but so inevitably it can't ever be scoured away completely. And you figure out that we are living creatures, in a world made of life, and we are simply not built to do anything forever - not even grieve. We change and adapt like everything else.
Even though all the faults and all the horrors are still there, in time you can watch the process of life within yourself break them down into their component parts, extract what nutrients there are, and devote them to new growth.
This becomes the real victory. You can never make yourself fuller of rage and hatred than the source of rage and hatred - you can never go to war hard enough to end war - and it becomes clear that that was never the point. The point is to allow nature, or the source of nature, to take your broken soul and break it down further, break it into its component parts and make something new out of it, let the hurt and the horror go, lay them down for the fertile soil of something altogether different.
Gardens can grow out of scrap-yards and the corpses of monsters.
- Rikki, 2011