Gratitude: The Antidote to Survivor’s Guilt
By Win Frederick
I was eating a cookie in a Panera Bread when I found out, secondhand, that the first boy I ever kissed—over a game of truth or dare in a neighbor’s garage—had died in prison. I was at home a few days later when my mom told me that she heard from someone else that he was, allegedly, alive and living in someone else’s garage.
It didn’t make sense. His face, framed by the contours of my phone screen, was looking right at me. His name (and it’s not a common one) was clearly printed in the 8 News Now article, as was the gruesome way in which he died, and his mugshot which had all of the features of the doughy-faced boy I remembered now transposed onto a gaunt and weary facade. I couldn’t process how he could be both alive and dead. This was more than a typo. In the most mundane scenario, it was a case of mistaken identity straight out of an old Hollywood noir film. In the most extraordinary case, it was the universe’s chaotic slip showing beneath the hem of her opaque and orderly skirt, revealing for a moment the possibility of multiple realities existing at once. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I began calling him Schrodinger’s Boy.
I was living in Michigan at the time. It was my first time living away from Las Vegas, and I was battling homesickness and nostalgia for a childhood that I was struggling to make sense of. I was working for a non-profit where, weekly, I visited the Muskegon county jail and taught literacy classes to incarcerated men. Some were old enough to be my father. Others were my age, early to mid-20s. Some were younger. Even though I played an authority figure role, my position in the non-profit ecosystem felt closer to the guys I was teaching than to the men in suits who wrote yearly donation checks or the women who worked part-time in the post-industrial city before driving back home to their safe and well-funded suburbs.
I worried a lot about money growing up but didn’t think of myself as poor until I started college. For instance, my supervisor at my work study job would say something in passing about the dangerousness of Western High School, and I would say, reflexively, that I grew up down the street from there. (By chance, I went to a magnet school on the other side of town.) I didn’t intend to embarrass people who made commentary about inner city poor folks, not realizing that one was among them. I was simply realizing in real time that I was one of those inner city poor people. I used big words when I talked, and I liked to buy nice clothes from thrift stores. Based on my appearance, people assumed that I was from a wealthy suburb or otherwise “not like the others.”
There are two ways people often rationalize a sense of exceptionalism. The first is to take credit for one’s supposed uniqueness. To say, everyone else around me is lazier, stupider, less responsible, etc. than I am. It’s an ego-driven way of making sense of senseless inequity, and it’s the way I saw things for a time when I was in college. I’m not proud of it, I was simply young and trying to understand why some of my friends growing up were becoming statistics while I was getting scholarships.
By the time I was living in Michigan, teaching adult literacy classes and writing talks about educational disparities, that self-aggrandizing way of thinking didn’t fit with my social conscience. In the jail, I met men who loved to read Toni Morrison and Anne Sexton, a man who knew how to make tacos out of ramen noodles, and a man who coached his son’s basketball team when he was “out in the world” as they called it.
Based on things like race and the zip code in which you live, you may be predisposed to premature death to paraphrase from political geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. As a young person I struggled for years with severe PTSD and depression that went overlooked. I did well enough in school and was so nervous that I avoided all confrontation. No one paid attention to how many hours I was sleeping or my binge eating or that I was often so zoned out that I chewed away at my nails and the insides of my cheeks until they bled. Externally, I presented as a bright kid with a bright future. Internally, I expected that I would be dead by 25. That I am alive and free and approaching 28 feels to me like a cosmic miracle.
I wasn’t special, just lucky. When I zoomed out on the picture of my life from the angle of un-specialness, I became racked with survivor’s guilt. It began to affect my work and eventually every part of my life. I was angry with the world for allowing some people to live freely while so many others who I knew and loved were trapped in cycles of poverty and death—of the body and of the spirit. I found myself asking, why me? There are so many brilliant and funny and talented people spending their lives in cages. What makes me worthy of freedom? But that neurotic survivor’s guilt was just as self-centered as my earlier way of thinking. It was just cloaked in wokeness.
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In lockdown, I decluttered. When you spend months on end in a one-bedroom apartment, you can really take stock of what you need and don’t need. I got rid of most of my clothes, most of my furniture, and most of my books. Before donating all but three novels that have yet to be read, I revisited Zadie Smith. Her novel Swing Time follows two young women who grew up in the same working class neighborhood, attending the same dance classes at a local community center. As little girls, they are kindred spirits dancing in step. Then adolescence sends them down divergent paths. One goes to college and travels the world working for an international pop star. The other young woman, more naturally gifted at dance but domestically troubled, ends up with her dream cut short by the reality of poverty and parental neglect. In an interview, Smith likens it to the massive tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade: millions of gifted people who had their human capactiy wasted, like a glass of water knocked to the floor. Sometimes when I think about some of the people I knew growing up or I reflect on the 300,000 and counting COVID-19 deaths in the United States, I think about all of the life so carelessly spilled.
Growing up, teachers told me that I had potential, that I should be a lawyer someday. What they seemed to mean was that I often got hung up on the meanings of things and that that hang up could be converted into earning potential. But I am not interested in earning potential, and I find the law to be a boring and bureaucratic charade. No offense to any lawyers. What I find more compelling is the potential of light in every person. The inner sun that shines through someone’s eyes when they tell you about a beautiful song they are learning to play or when they pull out their phone to show you a picture of their grandson.
The pandemic, the concurrent uprisings over police brutality and wealth inequality, and the daily realities of this historical moment have been hard for so many. There is so much to mourn. Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths were the cultiminating result of decades of avoidable and violent neglect. For those of us who have both privilege and a sense of conscience, neither self-congratulation nor survivor’s guilt can rationalize the chaos of life in 2020.
For the first few months of lockdown, I felt despair. I even thought about leaving the United States. I renewed the Barbadian passport that I haven’t used since entering the country as a toddler. Staying here, trying to “fix” the problems of this nation state seemed hopeless. Despair is not a sustainable mode of living, though. I had to give it up.
In a year that was hard for so many, I was doing relatively okay. I lost my retail job where I made only $10 an hour, but my husband was still gainfully employed. I had more free time to write, meditate, and declutter my living space. I finally had the time to heal from years of burnout and PTSD, both of which had manifested in my body as debilitating chronic pain for most of my 20s.
In lockdown, against the backdrop of so much unrest and so much loss, I began to feel deep joy for the first time since I was a kid. Author Sonya Renee Taylor compares joy to the sun. Unlike despair, joy is a source of renewable energy. It can be harnessed and stored in the body to use as we see fit. A younger version of me would have felt guilty for being happy and healthy while so many others were suffering. But this year, instead of guilt, I only felt gratitude.
Gratitude is the antidote to survivor’s guilt. It is not self-centered. When I was deep in the experience of survivor’s guilt, I was not of much use to other people. You can’t cook a meal for a friend or tutor your nephew or take your dad to the doctor when you’re consumed with feelings of guilt. It hinders presence. It hinders will.
I spent many years suspended, observing everything including my own life from the outside, like someone learning how to speak eloquently from watching people talk on TV. After a lifetime of suspension, I feel grounded by gratitude.
To feel deep gratitude is to understand that everything is a gift. Gifts, unlike rewards, are not earned. They are given and received just by chance. The more I understand this, the more I understand that I am entitled to nothing. Not even the things that I am legally entitled to. Not my minimally furnished apartment. Not my husband. Not even my Black and healing body, for which I am so especially grateful. It’s all on a loan. It could all be repossessed tomorrow, regardless of whose name is on the title.
I do not mean to prescribe gratitude for others or to suggest that 2020 was all joy and rainbows for me. I cannot, and it was not. The dialectic of grief and gratitude is that to feel deep gratitude, one must first experience the full range of emotions that come with grief. That experience is not pleasant, but the grounded freedom to which the struggle gives way is worth it.
The word resolve has many definitions, and they all concern endings and possibilities. At the end of a year that put the chaos of life on earth on full display, I am excited by the many possibilities that are yet to be uncovered, spiritually, socially, and politically.
Two years ago, on a sugar binge inside of a Panera Bread, I began to entertain the possibility of concurrent, contradictory realities. The circumstances of this year, allowed me to finally find peace in that possibility. Could a person be both alive and dead at the same time? Perhaps. And perhaps we can grieve the epic loss of human spirit this year while also celebrating its many triumphs.
Photo/Win Frederick.
Win Frederick is a writer and poet from Las Vegas, Nevada. They do lots of other things, but they mostly get paid to write. You can find their occasional posts on Instagram as @yeswincan.
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