I Will Survive
In the face of this high stakes election, Jay Edidin shares why he chooses to survive.
by Jay Edidin
The first Trump victory was another fracture in a year that had left my life jagged and piecemeal. Scarcely a year out of the closet, in the middle of a divorce, I watched the election on my best friend’s couch, on skype with my long-distance partner, the same way we’d listened to the Cubs win the World Series a few weeks before.
I remember that I was wearing red socks. I remember deciding that night to fly to New York as soon as I could afford to.
Everything was at stake, it felt like—but less so for me, standing self-contained in the rubble of my life and career, eyes on the horizon. What did I really have to lose, back then? (So much, in retrospect; but to my eyes, then, so little.)
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I don’t really talk about this, but I think about suicide a lot. For a long time, it was like poking at a sore spot, picking at a scab to see fresh blood. These days, it’s more like worrying at a scar, absently running my fingers across its ridge to reassure myself that the wound remains safely closed.
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This election, though. Oh, this one. This time, the stakes—the personal ones—are so much higher. I am seven years into HRT, with a different name and an M everywhere but the birth certificate I’m still not sure how to change. This time, I am married to the person with whom I watched that first terrible election. This time I am doing what I hope will be my life’s work. And most of all, this time, I have a baby—a toddler, now, almost two years old, talking in sentences, flying make-believe rockets to Neptune. I wear my heart outside of my body, watch it run and climb and sing strange little songs.
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Choosing to become a parent—which I know is not always a choice—is choosing to crack open the bones of your life and let hope nest deep in the marrow of you. It is reaching out your hands to grasp something utterly vulnerable and new and swearing in the face of all odds that you can bend and beat and cultivate the world into a shape that will nurture them. It is an absolute and permanent rejection of indifference. It is gaining a visceral new understanding of the words of Rabbi Tarfon: “You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
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I can’t promise that I will survive the next four years. I can’t promise that I will survive the next four days. Understand this: when I say “I will survive,” I am not talking about the vagaries of fate. I am talking about survival as a choice, as a deliberate act. Where survival is a choice, I will survive.
Survival is work, more or less. It’s generally dirty and difficult and unglamorous. Sometimes, it hurts more than anything. It’s a responsibility as much as it is a right, to sustain the strange and fragile state we call life.
I survive because some days the world is too ugly and cruel to keep living in; and where lives are at stake, there is work still to be done.
Jay Edidin is a writer and anticarceral advocate. He lives in Queens, New York, with his spouse and their child, and knits a lot of hats.