What Are You Surviving?
Drop me a line. I'd Love to Hear Your Story.
At any given moment in time, we are all surviving something.
I like to tell people that I survived a career in education. I say this in jest, but like most things I joke about, there is an element of truth in this statement. I taught high school students for 28 years and I loved my job, but it required a unique set of survival skills. It wasn’t so much the students or the content as it was the career, and the demands placed on me and other educators. Perhaps you can relate.
Sometimes survival is metaphorical, as in the above example. My life was not in danger – well, not imminently. I mean, we did regularly do active shooter drills, and I broke up some fights and removed a student or two who were throwing furniture, but mostly this survival was more about my mental health and surviving “teacher burnout.”
This is just one example of survival I have encountered in my 59 years on the planet, I have also survived embarrassment both at the hands of others and due to my own poor choices; I have survived my own overthinking and catastrophizing; and I have survived anxiety, depression, and grief born of loss. More significantly, I have survived a battle with alcoholism, and I have survived breast cancer.
All of these fights for survival have come with lessons, some more easily acknowledged than others. I have come to believe that I experience the most growth when I am struggling. If you’ve been following me, you are probably wondering what I am learning in this season of my life. Rest assured, when I figure it out, I will let you know.
There are so many people in this world who are surviving things that are unimaginable to me. There are people living through genocides, homelessness, and losses I cannot even wrap my brain around. They do not have the time or capacity to worry about the argument they just had with their spouse, the disrespectful comment their child hurled at them, or how out of touch their employer is with what is really going on in the classroom. All of our trials are important to us in the moment we are navigating, though.
I recently retitled this page. That decision was not born of anything going on in my life or in the world right now. I attended a writing conference a couple weeks ago, and after talking with other writers, I had an epiphany. I want this page to better reflect my own writing practice. That, of course, changes — sometimes daily, but what I am writing now and what I envision myself writing in the near future are stories grounded in survival.
In the next month, I will be sending my completed memoir to an editor. This book has been in the works for a couple years now, it is my labor of love. It merges my recovery from alcoholism with my journey through breast cancer. This is the book that was screaming to get out; I had to write it. It is about struggle and despair and lessons learned. The journey (thus far) has been cathartic, but it is not over.
I want to leave you with this. We are all facing challenges. Your struggle may feel small, or you may believe it is something you cannot possibly survive. I’m here to tell you that it is worth the fight. Survival is on the other side. Hang on, because the journey is worth the lessons learned about surviving this miraculous thing we call life.
