When I was 11, my birthday party was Survivor themed. My weird, praying mantis form that didn’t yet know how tweaked its DNA was meant to be. There I was in all my glory, dreaming of looking cool by donning a Buff that my mom ordered by calling the number on the screen after the Survivor episode ended as a tube top.
But Survivor was so popular back then that the Buffs were backordered and I repurposed it in October as a Survivor Halloween costume.
My party was in January but we lived in San Diego so the sun did what the sun does in San Diego and shined and shined and shined.
The birthday party guests and I divided ourselves into two tribes, made our team banners, performed challenges for the pleasure of onlookers at the public park (definitely some filament of my exhibitionest, performer root), including bowling with coconuts, an endurance challenge that involved holding our arms in the air for as long as we could, and a challenge where we passed water down the line of each team, trying to fill a big plastic bucket from Party City as our 11-year-old hand-eye-coordination could muster. No one was voted out because that was “too much” for a birthday party, but there were prizes for winners. I’m a Capricorn. Of course my birthday party had games with rules, winners, and losers.
Was it fun? I don't know, go interview one of my party guests instead.
Was it me? Abso-fucking-lutely.
Twenty one years later, I realize that Jeff Probst is a fucking zaddy. My partner Iman and I binge season after season of Survivor on the couch that has our butt imprints in Kansas City, Missouri. We compare notes on how the challenges compare from one season to another, often watching an old season simultaneously to the current one (yes, Survivor is still on, and yes, Season 46 is currently unveiling its episodes... Season 46!!!!). There are nostalgic feelings in my gut as I hum along to the opening theme.
Until we met, Iman had never watched Survivor. There’s that loving feeling of sharing a secret with them and that feels like living under a forever blanket fort, laughing and whispering through an eternal sleepover.
The Reddit thread that we pulled up to decide which order we’d watch the old seasons in suggested we check out Season 32. There is sun and sand and blue waters on the island of Koh Rong, the second largest island of Cambodia where the season was filmed. In this season, there is a chicken that the contestants name Mark that (spoiler alert) makes it all the way to the finale without getting eaten.
As we’re watching, there is snow and snow and snow on the ground outside of our house with the “homo sweet homo” doormat in Kansas City, Missouri. It is winter. We quietly wonder if the noise outside is a neighbor, one of our chickens who are not named Mark, or if Iman was finally found by an anti-abortion extremist.
Over the course of a few days, after Iman gets home from the abortion clinic, we watch Season 32 obsessively, through every challenge and tribal council, including the one during the finale that I am shocked is still held in a sound studio for the reading of the winning votes. It really hasn’t changed much in its 24 years and 46 seasons.
Survivor is iconic. The fact that they have enough viewership, funding, and contestant interest to keep it running for what is basically a generation blows my mind. There are guides on Reddit of the right order to view them. And enough of us still want to tune in and watch real adult human beings waste away in the elements for what started as 39 days, and then post-Covid changed to 26-days, without shelter, food, jobs, families, or any part of the real world. All to “outwit, outplay, and outlast” one another.
Am I a super fan? Probably not. But as I sit and watch Jeff Probst and his artificially inseminated dimples wink from on screen as they look for new castmates, I can't help but dream of submitting my contestant video.
The video that will never actually exist.
What does it mean to survive? I find pleasure in Survivor not because I would never want to be a contestant, but because I actually can’t be one.
I’d never even make it past the casting screening. Survivor doesn’t have a place for differently abled bodies and as a Type 1 diabetic tethered to refrigerated insulin and internet dependent pumps and monitors, I would not make it a goddamn day. The ableism is core to its design with primarily physically grueling challenges even for the strongest and most able bodied athletes. I am stronger now, now that I had surgery to remove my sick thyroid that had two diseases and a little cancer brewing. But that still just doesn’t cut it to casually throw myself onto the likes of a reality show on an island without hospitals down the block. Sure, I can do super spontaneous things like order a sugar free vanilla latte as a little treat or take my Zoom calls from the upstairs instead of the downstairs, but every day I wake up and take a pill to replace my old thyroid, rub my thyroid tattoo for good luck, and do my daily challenges of being a diabetic by injecting myself with a drug that if I take too much will kill me quickly by way of a coma, and if I take too little, will kill me slowly by way of organ failure. And while that’s too much for Survivor, I know I am surviving. Lasting. Against these odds.
What does it mean to survive? As someone who experienced sexual trauma in high school and early college, the concept of survival in my mind’s eye is covered in an opaque, grey lens of silent violence and its cellular level ripple effects. How it took me years to undo all the walls of dissociating I had built up as protective measures but needed to crumble in order to find healing and pleasure in sex. How I learned to communicate that you can’t touch my neck when we’re intimate even if I trust that you won’t choke me. How I grip my keys different. How I run up the stairs of parking garages three at a time. How I will never feel comfortable being alone in a workplace with a man again. A weird new video game where each day is another level and at the end of the day I level-up because I outplayed myself for making it. But then I celebrated the new level too hard. How I used alcohol as a tool to distract my brain from the pain and anxiety it caused me. How I perpetuated and caused harm when I used alcohol as a tool. How I found sobriety. How I use my sobriety as a tool to ensure my consent or lack of consent is never questioned, ignored, or not believed ever again. How I still Google the names sometimes to see if they’re still alive which the odds are high that they are alive but I still look, with curiosity, to see find out.
What does it mean to survive? It took me 28 years to finally realize, believe, and own my queerness. Some of my queer family have been waking up every day and finding ways to survive in a world that increasingly wishes queers didn’t exist for so much longer than I have. As state legislatures hear record numbers of bills aiming to erase trans and queer people, to erase trans and queer culture, to erase Black history, to erase bodily autonomy, we queers laugh to keep going. We laugh to stay alive. We find each other, as family, and cook each other carnitas around small tables and drink Topo Chico after Topo Chico and rewrite our own futures every time we hug each other as we queer space and time with wit and hotness and pleasure and wisdom that only comes from knowing ourselves and believing in ourselves so authentically because we don’t have another choice.
What does it mean to survive? If Survivor hosted a season not on a remote island but instead right here in the middle of America, in the very neighborhoods of the fans, not all of the contestants would make it out alive. It wouldn’t be a matter of malnourishment and a bad sunburn or a poorly aimed machete hack, it would be whether or not the contestant had the identities that our police-state is intentionally designed to protect, or ones the police-state is designed to harm, punish, and erase. The challenges would be finding a job and keeping it without being impacted by layoffs. Finding a way to pay for illness and disability. Diving down into the flooded climate-change-hurricane waters of a street, again and again, to see if they could find the storage of N95s to keep the contestants from circulating Covid for the second time in 26 days. And that's just if we were lucky to be born or move or having family move here. Social media is giving us a front row account of families and young people in Gaza being forced to use the most inhumane survival mechanisms like having their babies suck on dates, to sift through the dirt to try and find specks of flour to mash together for some form of basic caloric intake because oppressors are preventing aid trucks from coming across the border. Who cares about who survives? Who is in control of who survives? What would it mean if we reconsidered our own collective survival as carefully as producers consider the survival of Survivor?
We survive so much, all of us. Some of our lives are shorter than others. Some of our lives are more chaotic than others. But the constant is our survival. We survive so much in the face of such terrifyingly-stacked-against-us odds. We survive so much and with such gusto that we find comfort in knowing that some of us, the lucky ones, were born with the bodies to be accepted to go sit on a beach, safe from our systems who are methodically and religiously trying to kill us, for 26 days. And that some of us, all the rest, get to sit at home and watch them spend those 26 days on that beach vacation. It means so much to survive. To outwit, outplay, and outlast this achingly beautiful, ever crumbling place.
This week, I finished reading Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward and fuck was that an stunning read. I am so moved, over and over, by Ward’s words.
This is an essay I’ve been tinkering with for a while but haven’t been able to find a home for so here it is, in its home, for yall.