Survival Is Okay, Thrival Is Better
By Wickham Boyle
This morning I thought I’d get T-shirts printed up that read:
I survived my cat jumping on my head at 5 a.m. (after falling asleep at 3 a.m.).
Perhaps it might sell. After all, I see T-shirts that proffer surviving everything from a twenty-fifth Catholic-school reunion to a whitewater rafting family vacation. We have even seen people on the news wearing: I Survived Hurricane Katrina, and my favorite: I Survived the NYC Blackout – faint white letters on an inky black shirt. You don’t see I Survived September 11 T-shirts, but you do see hats that blaze with GROUND ZERO or 9/11.
Is this why TV’s Survivor is still so popular? For us to gloat at the poor shlubs who falter, as we tell ourselves: “Oh, I am better than that. I would have done it differently and succeeded.”?
I wrote a book about my experiences during and after 9/11: A Mother’s Essays From Ground Zero. I didn’t want it to be an “I survived” book; I was hoping purely to chronicle a personal immersion in what was immediately evident as a history-making, world-shaking tragic event. I wrote because after all I am a writer, and we all revert to what we know in times of crisis.
But because of the book I was asked to come out to Los Angeles and audition for the real TV Survivor and because, at that time, I was the mother of a 13-year-old boy, and I would have done anything to appear even a smidgeon of cool in his eyes, I went. And lo and behold, despite my older-woman, wacky, outspoken demeanor, or because of it, they chose me.
I was scheduled to be in the Survivor Thailand group, and I would have left my family, work, and home from October 2002 until just before Christmas.
That’s when fate intervened. I was invited (not by CBS) to write a documentary on how people get to be creative, my father became very ill, and the CBS folks told me if that he died while I was in Thailand they wouldn’t even inform me. To make their point they regaled me with tales of how the survivors who were in mid-challenge during September 11, 2001, never even knew what had happened until weeks later when they were reunited with the world.
CBS further tells all participants that they, CBS, have the right, the sole, God-like right, to edit the footage the way they deem appropriate. So if you have one grumpy moment, pick your nose, or yell at someone once, but spend the rest of the time as Florence Nightingale, if the CBS techies need a nerd or a bitch, they can create it from your meltdown.
This was a deeply unsettling notion, so with my documentary-movie deal, and my aging father, my daughter about to begin freshman year in college, and my penchant for control, I gratefully turned down the offer to be a Survivor and decided instead to think of myself as a thriver.
This shift in my personal mindset does not seem to correspond with the American landscape that constantly plays in the media. The said landscape is encapsulated in slogans and catch phrases in which everyone is surviving something. It is a time when, I agree, we are mightily challenged. But do you think that Job would have bought a T-shirt that read: I survived boils, toads, drought, and pestilence”?
I don’t think so.
Maybe if, instead of just surviving, we focus on the ability to out-thrive whatever life throws at us, then we won’t be so stuck on noticing every moment where we just make it through. Granted that the earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, and political firestorms have been daunting this past year. But maybe if we shift our view a few degrees to the horizon and a glimpse of the incandescence of high achievement – thrive, baby, thrive – then we won’t be so stuck on the notion of survival.
That means we can dispense with those T-shirts, right?
