May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I’ve been pretty vocal online about my lengthy history of depression and anxiety in the past, but this year everything feels a little different… for glaringly obvious reasons.
2020 has been marked by a collective trauma — the effects of which will vary widely across the world and may not fully be comprehended for many months, maybe years. While I am not a psychologist or expert by any means, survivor’s guilt will, by definition, affect up to 99.99% of the global population in the coming year. Maybe you’ve been feeling it already.
Survivor’s guilt is something people may experience after living to tell the tale of a life-threatening event, while others did not. First identified amongst Holocaust survivors, this condition can affect war veterans, survivors of terrorist attacks, airplane crashes or other incidents of mass casualty, sexual assault, poverty or homelessness, or natural disasters (read also: global pandemics). It causes a negative thought loop that makes you falsely believe that you could have, or should have, done something differently to mitigate the losses of the event, when in fact you did nothing wrong. This negative cycle of thoughts can result in feelings of irritability, numbness, or helplessness, as well as physical manifestations of stress, like sleeplessness, changes in eating habits, headaches, stomachaches, etc. If you struggle with your mental health on a regular basis already, or have unresolved traumas, it may feel especially overwhelming, and can potentially trigger unhealthy coping mechanisms that helped you survive those traumas in the past.
I am no stranger to survivor’s guilt. I grew up just above the poverty threshold, and today, I make a comfortable living doing something I enjoy. I’ve been homeless three times, and yet never once did I sleep on the streets. I was sexually assaulted and didn’t tell anyone for three years… there were many reasons for this, but one was believing that my story wasn’t worth telling because others lived to tell worse tales. It required years of therapy to identify these traumas, confront the self-destructive coping mechanisms that I acquired from surviving them, and accept that I am not at fault for thriving despite it all.
And while this pandemic has presented its challenges to my personal and professional life, as well as my mental health, I still feel incredibly grateful. In fact, the intensity of my gratitude makes sharing this feel weird, but that’s the inherent ugliness of survivor’s guilt, and I think it’s a big reason why no one talks about it. So if even one person feels validated after reading this, then it was worth sharing.
I want to start out with the positives, because let’s face it, unless you die from Covid-19, there’s at least one. First of all, and most importantly, I’m alive. I also permanently reside in a country that quickly and effectively contained it with just over 300 cases and 0 deaths. I had a month off of work in February, which for the first three weeks, felt like an extended vacation. My job was reinstated in March, because the school where I teach had the resources to adapt to an online learning environment. Despite pay cuts, I received a living wage per my contract, and I also received a stimulus check from the US government, which was rare and unexpected. Due to fewer working hours and my ability to work from home, I spent nearly 2 months in voluntary self-isolation, where I had the opportunity to get back into writing, reconnect with old friends, bond with my cat, take naps aplenty, and just generally tune into my mind, body, and spirit in a way that wasn’t possible with the distractions of balancing a full-time job and a social life.
But naturally, there are still negatives relative to my experience. First of all, almost 350,000 people have died, nearly a third of which were citizens of my home country. I watched from the relative safety of my country of residence as America devolved into a state of mass confusion, hysteria, apathy, and inaction at the hands of incompetent national leadership. When the Vietnamese government directed schools to remain closed for another two weeks on February 16th, it was suddenly very clear that the matter was serious, and not going away anytime soon. After being unemployed for three weeks, my boyfriend, who is a teacher at a different school here, began struggling with his decision to fly back to his home country, because his school was not paying him and they didn’t have the resources to adapt to an online learning environment. He boarded one of the last planes to South Africa the day before WHO declared a global pandemic, and with Visa restrictions and border closures still in place, it’s uncertain when he will return. Per my contract, I was allotted a severance payment for completing one year with my company in February, and a re-signing bonus in March, and due to financial losses and the for-profit nature of language schools in Vietnam, I will never see that money. And while my self-isolation was nurturing in many ways, survivor’s guilt was brewing, and my previous traumatic experiences, despite all the work I’d put into confronting them, suddenly felt much heavier as I grappled with new feelings of loss, anger, boredom, and uncertainty.
I want to be clear that I am not writing this to brag or complain. I am not writing this to throw anyone under the bus or air my dirty laundry. I am writing this because it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and because this is what’s currently weighing down my psyche and threatening the progress I’ve made so far. I’m writing this because survivor’s guilt will affect so many other people in their own unique ways as we come out of this, and I would be remiss if I wasn’t honest about my previous struggles with it.
And finally, I’m writing this to let you know, dear reader, if you’ve made it this far, that you are not alone. Whether you are a healthcare worker on the frontlines, a server or bartender who lost their job, an essential employee who doesn’t have the luxury of staying home, a teacher who adapted their entire curriculum to accommodate online learning, a graduate who missed their commencement ceremony, or a person who just passively endured this crisis and feels sick and tired of hearing about it… your struggles and the feelings that accompany them are real, and they are valid. Unless, of course, you think the latter is an excuse to put your interests above the health and safety of others. In that case, get back inside and think about what you’ve done.
I learned the long and hard way that survivor’s guilt doesn’t go away by stifling the feelings it produces. The only way to overcome it is to acknowledge them for what they are – normal, human reactions to trauma. Your survival is a gift, and you can be especially confident now that you are here for a reason.
In writing this, I think I found mine.
The Unpolished Gemini 