what doesn't kill you

There's often a fixation on death, when we think about how bad something is, and how we should assess that. How many people are killed by the police, or by Covid-19. Poverty isn't real poverty, unless it kills. Threats aren't serious unless people are dying.

For every death, there are often far more having their potential stolen, opportunities to thrive crushed. Some experiences make us stronger, or wiser. Some of us are better at adapting. On the surface, this variation can give the impression that we need only strive for more positive outcomes. That's not how the circuitry actually works, though. There are causal relationships to everything.

Far more often than death, covid causes severe illness, wreaking havoc on the body in all sorts of destructive ways, sometimes causing long term debilitation and damage. Police violence can be brutally traumatizing both physically and mentally. How many people in poor neighborhoods and in prisons have PTSD from how they're treated by our criminal justice system? Or those in poverty, not getting enough healthy food, growing up in a highly stressful environment, drinking from lead pipes or subject to other pollutants? These things have serious consequences for brain function and development. 

We adapt, and think of it as who we are. We can't measure how much we've lost, or who we might have otherwise been, but there are all sorts of studies and statistics on this stuff, making it relatively clear. Stress in particular can be a lot more destructive than commonly understood. What doesn't kill us can make us a whole lot weaker. Then something else kills us.

When I think of my survival, when my problems feel existential, it's because I'm always thinking about these consequences. I've been trying so hard to get myself out of this hole I'm in, that the thought of backsliding terrifies me. I'm ashamed of not being strong enough to have other priorities, like going to visit my father before he dies, but if I'm not judicious here, I'll be no use to anyone.

Dropping everything to spend a month in Hawaii feels like an impossibly terrible idea, as I'm desperately trying to recover from tumbling backwards these past few months. Just maybe maybe I can get it together. I need to transition to thinking long term, as covid isn't going away any time soon. It's a risk I need to accept. Hopefully I'll just be asymptomatic, but I need to stop worrying about catching it at all. 

As long as I'm trying not to catch it, I can't do anything. I can't go on like this though. There are other sorts of survival I need to be thinking about.