The myth of survival
TW: This post contains heavy themes of death and suicide, which I believe are under-discussed. Before continuing, please care for yourself by assessing your capacity to explore this discussion.
The myth of survival is that it can keep happening.
It can’t.
Survival is a temporary, liminal, and unresolved state that must collapse into either death or flourishing.
To survive is to resist death. To resist death is to resist the cyclical nature of life. To resist the cyclical nature of life is to resist flourishing and miss the whole damn point.
Further, individual survival comes at the cost of collective survival. As in, a group of individuals stuck in survival mode will not be able to form coherent community. The way to sustain collective survival is to create collective flourishing. As in, we can only survive for so long before we begin to experience either collective transformation or collective decay.
Before you continue… 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
The people of South Sudan are experiencing one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time. Being queer is criminalized here, and LGBTQI+ individuals are in constant danger due to state violence, religious persecution, and societal hate.
Sophie, a trans refugee living in Gorom Refugee Camp, asked me to share her recent interview to spread awareness.
Survival is temporary.
Not everything is meant to survive. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my life, it’s that death is my friend.
In my experience, you can tell when the reaper is knocking because you are brought to a crossroad we all face, often many times over the course of our lives: evolve or die.
Evolution comes at the cost of ego death. This isn’t to say the ego goes away, but that it is formed of layers of illusion, and shedding those layers feels like dying.
I’ve dealt with suicidal thoughts in some form or another off and on for years. The biggest respite I find in the moments when that voice is loudest is to ask it, “what part of me really wants to die right now?”
I usually have suicidal thoughts when I’m experiencing emotions that feel overwhelmingly painful. In those moments, my ego tries to sell me the belief that the part of me wanting to die is my physical body.
Yet my physical body is the one who shows up in every moment, through breath first and foremost. My physical body has been through extraordinarily difficult experiences, yet has not given up.
When I remember that, it is easier to pause and assess what part of me really wants to die. Sometimes it’s the voice of high expectations. Sometimes it’s the voice of entitlement to comfort. Sometimes it’s the voice of self-hatred. Sometimes it’s the voice of shame. Sometimes, it’s the voice of a long day that left me at my wits end trying to cope with a complex wall of emotions and embodied sensations that make me want to crawl out of my own skin.
Once I’ve identified that it’s not my physical body asking to die, but a part of my ego (my construct/illusion of self), I’m able to lay down and let that part of myself die. So many times it just looks like having a good cry, falling asleep, and waking up feeling the tiniest bit lighter.
This takes patience.
But in the long run, this process has led me to stop surviving. On a certain level, this truly looks like giving up. I’m not fighting for my life anymore. Life is a gift, and when my life is done, it’s done, and that will also be a gift. In the interim, I am learning how to participate in flourishing. I say it this way because I cannot flourish on my own. Survival fractures society. Flourishing defines it.
Survival is a response to dis-integration. Integration creates flourishing. And what is integration but a fancy word for putting the parts of a system back together? And what am I if not a part in a system? Not a cog in a machine, no. More like a cell in an organism. Maybe there is really only one Human, after all. Maybe we’re all just cells. And maybe cancer is what happens when cells forget where and how they belong in a body.
I think the collective Human still has a chance, if we can let the reaper take what he wants instead of simply handing him another limp corpse because we weren’t willing to accept what it felt like to be alive.
Love,
MOXIE MAVERICK
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