a survival synonymous with cruelty: reframing kindness as protection.
As a suicide attempt survivor, I’ve thought a lot about survival. How, even during my darkest moments, I can think of the most fucked up things and on the other end still have a functioning body as long as I keep my hands to myself.
When you deal with so much so young, you’re forced to create this tough edge of yourself. This is the edge that keeps you alive, that turns a blind eye to the pain of others in pursuit of the preservation of the self.
The need for survival can be traced into everything. Why do we love? Why do we want money, fame, notoriety? All of these provide different forms of survival and preservation. We as a species are hard wired to keep moving forward, even when we really don’t want to.
As I’m getting older, I want to soften myself up, and be a kinder and more public person. And as I work towards that goal, I found that losing my edge feels like losing my survival. As though my ability to be mean and loud is what has kept me alive.
When we view as survival through our primitive ancestors eyes, all interactions become violence, fear, and ‘instinct’. Our modern world is so laminated from actual violence. We are a ‘civil’ people now. We share the roads, parking lots, work towards common societally accepted goals. And yet, the traces of what our ancestors did for survival are everywhere. We live in fear for the next break-in, government overthrowal, rapist, and more. Americans feel as though everything that can hurt us can be shot. Propersity and survival is guaranteed with a bullet in the chamber.
For the sake of myself, I’m trying to rewrite the survival I need to move forward not as acts of violence prepared, but acts of kindness and empathy. I already hear the comments calling me naive. I, more than most, have experienced what abuse is like on multiple different levels. I know what it’s like to be afraid in the dark of what lurks outside, or what comes in.
Yet, throughout 2 bouts of PTSD, I still force myself to put down the need to turn to physical violence as a clutch like an addict drags a teenager away from their first hit. I have wanted violence against others in the name of survival, and I’ve committed violence against myself in defiance of it. I know that it’s the solution we crave, but it’s not a solution that we should build a world around.
Our modern world is increasingly becoming steeped in paranoia about our collective societal survival, and then of our own among all of the ‘other awful people out there’.
Anti ‘other people’ sentiment is so strong that it feels nauseating when you realize how much of our culture is starkly anti-social. Our few and far between areas of public gatherings feel rife with tension and annoyances. E.G: Planes, subways, parks, highways, grocery stores, etc. Photos and videos of bad behavior spill onto every social media platform, everyone is calling each other a fucking idiot, ‘I hate other people’ is such a common sentiment.
Survival has traditionally been seen as an anti-other (e.g: “I need to do xyz before they do”), and as our survival becomes more tense, so do we towards the average person. This has definitely been an increase in this issue since COVID, with public fights, road rage, bad behavior, online vitriol, spam, and more increasing, further pushing the sentiment that other people are the issue and they must be responded to with a guarded heart, fear, violence, and more.
This is something I’m trying to unlearn within myself. I’m trying to teach myself that kindness is a survival tool. Being nice to people, keeping friends who take care of you, doing work that inspires people to keep moving forward. Trying to be a good and empathatic person is the only form of survival that doesn’t feel heavy to hold.
There is a point after something horrible has happened where you imagine the only way you will ever respond to anyone again is with a knife out. And then, you wake up to the softness of friends sending you memes, people asking if you want to hang out soon, family checking in, and more.
Violence can be what keeps you feeling prepared, but kindness is what you need to keep yourself sane.
I think survival by violence is fucking boring. Any species can bring the claws out and attack, run away, hide, and shriek. But humans have something we don’t see in nature as often: the ability to empathize with our ‘others’, be patient and kind, supportive of others, build relationships and pathways for care, and to be strategic in the deeds we do in this world to move forward.
That doesn’t mean my ‘’no violence rule” applies to any and all situations. The death of nuance will be the death of rationality, too. There is cause for violence, but not nearly at the scale of the harm being inflicted to the amount of harm required. I’m speaking strictly in the sense of interpersonal relations and integrating with other people in a day to day society.
The issues we face are enough of a problem without worrying if we’re going to get shot by someone for pulling into their driveway to turn around.
I wrote in a previous essay something that sticks with me to this day about the beauty of empathy and de-escalation within our species, something we don’t see in other animal kingdoms. “We have the opportunity to be something more rare than being alive: being kind.”
I feel those words so deeply, but I still struggle to live them all of the time. There will always be justification for anger, violence, and inflicting pain. Human beings can rationalize anything if it justifies their response.
I don’t know much about our coming world, besides that it scares me. But I do know, kindness is not just a form of fawning or weakness.
It is a strategic tool, and a way to bloodlessly survive in a world that seems to demand more and more blood to be spilled in the name of self-preservation. There will always be reason for violence. And that is why it’s more important than ever not to choose it.
