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Survivor. It’s the word we use to describe a person who copes well with the difficulties of life. In a tragic event, it’s the word we use to describe someone who has survived the tragedy.

Survivor.

It’s a pretty word. It’s a strong word. It’s easy to say. It sounds good. It makes so much more sense, right? I mean, who wants to be a victim? Just hearing the word victim makes me sad. Saying it aloud is almost impossible. It’s a word that is painful to say. I cannot say it and smile. I mean, just try it. Say, “I am a victim” aloud while smiling. It doesn’t work.

But stand up straight, hold your shoulders back, relax your face, and say, “I am a survivor.” It works. It’s much easier to say and it is certainly much easier for you to hear.

And so that’s who I am. I am a survivor. I am a survivor, along with tens of thousands of others who lived through Butte County’s Camp Fire on November 8^th, 2018.

But what if I don’t want to be a survivor? What if I don’t want my life to be defined by this thing, this thing I survived? What if I just want to be, like I was before, without this label?

It’s difficult to describe to someone who has never lived it what it is like to live through a natural disaster. To put it simply, it is exhausting.

It is exhausting dealing with the paperwork, the mounds of paperwork which come with FEMA and the insurance claims. Then there is the paperwork for your children to attend new schools, join a new health insurance plan, and enroll in new activities in your new town. There are job applications to fill out. Forms to file to receive new copies of important documents. Change of address forms, requests for private financial assistance, tax documents. The list goes on.

It is exhausting going through bags and boxes of donations from well-meaning family, friends and acquaintances of clothing that doesn’t fit, is too well worn, just isn’t your style, or that you don’t need because someone else already gave you something similar. It is exhausting trying to figure out how to politely decline generous donations of expensive items people want to gift you. But how do you explain that while you had those items before, you don’t need them now? Sure, you’ll have a television again, and pots and pans, and furniture, but until then, you don’t want to tote anything extra around. So, rather than argue, you politely say thank you, and make yet another trip to Goodwill.

It is exhausting trying to make plans for the future, let alone answer questions about those plans. The famous question always is, “Are you planning to rebuild?” but most of us don’t have an answer to that yet. How can we decide when we don’t know what the infrastructure of our town will be, how long the clean-up will take, how much money we will receive from insurance, and when our town’s drinking water will even be safe? Most of us are living in limbo still, even though it’s been more than two months since the Camp Fire.

We have all been changed by this natural disaster. Our lives suddenly have this division, this division that defines our lives before the fire and our lives after the fire. We have been described as resilient. Persistent. As fighters.

Survivors.

We have become survivors.

Elizabeth Edwards once said, “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept it and try to put together something that is good.”

And so we are survivors. We have chosen to accept, to surrender, and to move forward.

And together, we will build something beautiful.

Tags: camp fire, horses, paradise, wildfire

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