Hello rockin survivors....
I thought I would share something I read recently on the subject of survival. It offers some interesting insights to the importance of not only surviving but of achieving something beyond survival. Somedays it is easier than others to acknowledge we have been ‘victims’ at different times in our lives but we refuse to accept the role as inevitable for the rest of our life experiences. We go beyond survival. Yet other days we can find ourselves stuck in ‘victim mode’…. we continue to define ourselves by the role of a victim and get caught in a cycle of surviving with a will not to survive at all but to merely exist.

I am sharing some excerpts from <font color="blue">Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature by Margaret Atwood </font> because I think it offers some interesting parallels to some thinking patterns that we all understand from the perspective of mental illness.

Ms Atwood argues that <font color="blue"> every country or culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core... The central symbol for Canada is Survival, la Survivance. She goes on to suggest that “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all. Our central idea is one which generates .... an almost intolerable anxiety. Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience.... The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life.

A preoccupation with one's survival is necessarily also a preoccupation with the obstacles to that survival. In earlier writers these obstacles are external -- the land, the climate, and so forth. In later writers the obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal; they are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being. Sometimes fear of these obstacles becomes itself the obstacle, and a character is paralyzed by terror (either of what he thinks is threatening him from the outside, or of elements in his own nature that threaten him from within). It may even be life itself that he fears; and when life becomes a threat to life, you have a moderately vicious circle. If a man feels he can survive only by amputating himself, turning himself into a cripple or a eunuch, what price survival?

.... at some point the failure to survive, or the failure to achieve anything beyond survival, becomes not a necessity imposed by a hostile outside world but a choice made from within. Pushed far enough, the obsession with surviving can become the will not to survive.

Certainly Canadian authors spend a disproportionate amount of time making sure that their heroes die or fail. Much Canadian writing suggests that failure is required because it is felt -- consciously or unconsciously -- to be the only 'right' ending, the only thing that will support the characters' (or their authors') view of the universe. When such endings are well handled and consistent with the whole book, one can't quarrel with them on aesthetic grounds. But when Canadian writers are writing clumsy or manipulated endings, they are much less likely to manipulate in a positive than they are in a negative direction. Why should this be so? Could it be that Canadians have a will to lose which is as strong and pervasive as the Americans will to win?

... but surely the Canadian gloom is more unrelieved than most and the death and failure toll out of proportion. Given a choice of the negative or positive aspects of any symbol -- sea as life-giving Mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth, tree as what falls on your head - Canadians show a marked preference for the negative.

You might decide at this point that most Canadian authors with any pretensions to seriousness are neurotic or morbid... but if the coincidence intrigues you -- so many writers in such a small country, and all with the same neurosis -- then I will offer you a theory.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Canada as a whole is a victim, or an "oppressed minority " or "exploited”... Let us suppose in short that Canada is a colony..... a place from which a profit is made, but not by the people who live there: the major profit from a colony is made in the centre of the empire.... for the "mother country".... Of course, there are cultural side-effects which are often identified as "the colonial mentality," and it is these which are examined here; but the root cause for them is not economic.

If Canada is a collective victim, it should pay some attention to the Basic Victim Positions. These are like the basic positions in ballet or the scales on the piano: They are primary, though all kinds of song-and-dance variations on them are possible.....

One: To deny the fact that you are a victim.
Two: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of Biology, the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other large general powerful idea.
Three: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable.
Four: To be a creative non-victim.”
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Ms Atwood gave me cause to ask myself... what position do I take on the question of being a victim? I don’t deny that I have been a victim. I used to deny it but not now. Not since I came out of denial about my own mental illnesses.

I used to carry full responsibility for everything that happened to me in my life. “People abandoned me because I wouldn’t let them into my life.” “He beat me up because I was too mouthy... I provoked him.“ “I was left alone to take care for my mother because I promised to do it and to never ask anyone to help.” I had learned to never hold anyone accountable for their actions. I always took responsibility and so I denied that I was a victim because that would suggest someone, or some circumstance beyond my choosing or control made me a victim.

As time went on this kind of thinking... the need to maintain total control of my environment and circumstances began to flip. The overwhelming sense of aloneness, exhaustion, endlessness, worthlessness and hopelessness brought me into what Ms Atwood would describe as the second position. It began a period of endless ‘pity parties’. “If my mother hadn’t had that accident my life would be better.” “If the medical system did more than push drugs my mother won’t be an addict and I wouldn’t have to be her pharmacist.” “If I wasn’t such an emotional basket case people would stick around and love me.” “If God was real...” A victim but there’s nothing I can do but live with it.

Fast forward some more time and my bi polar cycling is getting more and more difficult to live with. My illness labels more impossible to deny. The extreme episodes are getting increasingly more challenging to survive and I finally start to ask for help. I finally wanted to do more than survive... to merely exist in a cycle of hell. I wanted instead to survive so that I might live a better life than the one I’d known for 40 of my 53 years. That sounds like Atwood’s position three. Acknowledging that I have been a victim of psychological and emotional abuse; self-destructive behaviours including suicides, cuttings and risk-takings; states of denial that caused me to blame myself rather than understand my illness; physical abuses when the raging of others escalated into violence directed at me. I finally came to realize that yes I have been a victim but I’m not going to let it define me any more. I’m not going to be a victim again. It doesn’t have to be like that any more. I can not only survive but I can move into a new reality.

That brings me to position number four.... to be a creative non-victim. For me this means that I am walking in the fullness of my personal power and with a clear signal of communication with my Creator. I walk forward towards my destiny. A destiny determined by love, hope and peace. I am filled with creative ideas about how to achieve my dreams. I am filled with creative energy to walk into my life with my power solidly in place. On days like these I don’t feel like a victim. I don’t act like a victim. I feel like one who was a victim and then a survivor and now an over-comer. I have overcome that I might do great things in the future despite and because of what I have overcome.

Yet not everyday is it so obvious. Some days I have to believe in the unseen. I have to walk in faith that my desires for my life are possible... are doable... are reasonable.... are achievable. The old saying... if I do my part than the Creator can do the rest. Just so long as I make the effort... declare my faith then I am giving Creator permission to guide my next steps.

There are still those days that come and stick me back to thinking like I’m doomed to forever be in position two. My illness, my circumstances, my relationships are just too imposing for me to think I can try to overcome them. Those days when a voice in my head tells me that I shouldn’t bother trying... that I’d be better off crawling back into my pit and staying there. Trying life out of the pit is too risky. Why bother if I always end up back in the pit. The voice keeps working me to try to convince me the pit is the best place for me to be.

Not today... and if I can just keep my focus... if I can just keep reminding myself that the pit isn’t a place I want to be ever again then maybe I can keep moving forward in what Ms Atwood calls Position Four.... that of ‘a creative non-victim’.

And if I feel sometimes like getting back into bed with all my favourite things and having a 'me day' with a good movie or a book... I won't be confused into thinking I'm giving into the lure of the pit but I will know the difference.

When what once was a trap is now a gift... well that I declare is not just overcoming but it is mastering the art of personal power and healthy self-care.

I think on that note.... I'm going to take the rest of the day off!!!

Be good to yourselves people... ask more of dreams than you feel like dreaming and balance it with giving yourself more than you might think you deserve. We deserve the very best life has to offer us. We deserve for our dreams to come true.