Survival Is Not the Same as Responsibility

Survival is not an achievement. It is a biological imperative — the body's refusal to stop, the organism's stubborn insistence on continuing even when continuing is hard. Survival is what happens to you. It does not require a decision. It does not require courage in the way we usually mean the word. It requires only that you keep going.

This matters because many people confuse having survived with having lived. They confuse endurance with growth. They treat the fact of their continuing existence as the whole story, when it is only — only — the precondition for the story that actually needs to be written.

What Survival Does Not Give You

Survival does not give you direction. It does not give you wisdom automatically, though suffering can produce wisdom if you are willing to do the additional work of examining it. It does not resolve the wounds that were inflicted on you. It does not guarantee that you will not inflict those same wounds on the next person who comes close enough to be hurt by them.

Survival, by itself, is neutral. What you do with the life that survived — that is where character is made or lost.

The Weight of Responsibility

Responsibility is the decision to take seriously what you do with the fact of your survival. It is the refusal to treat your own pain as a sufficient explanation for the pain you cause others. It is the recognition that the cycle you inherited does not have to be the cycle you pass forward.

This is not easy. In fact it is one of the hardest things a person can do — to look honestly at what was done to you, to feel the full weight of it, and then to refuse to let it become your excuse. To say: this happened, it was real, it matters, and it stops with me.

Born at the Border is built around this tension — between the legitimate grief of having survived things that should not have happened, and the equally legitimate demand that survival be followed by something more than endurance.

The Question After Survival

If you have survived something — and most people reading this have, in some form — the question that follows is not: how did I make it?

The question is: now that I have made it, what am I going to do?

Not what will you do with your career, your money, your status. What will you do with the wound? What will you do with the story? What will you do with the very real possibility that someone who comes after you is going to need you to have done something with it?

Survival kept you alive. Responsibility decides who you become after you've survived. Only one of those is a choice.