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According to a trusted source (Wikipedia), survivors guilt or syndrome “is a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives her/himself to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not. It may be found among survivors of combat, natural disasters, epidemics, among the friends and family of those who have committed suicide, and in non-mortal situations among those whose colleagues are laid off. The experience and manifestation of survivor’s guilt will depend on an individual’s psychological profile. When the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV) was published, survivor guilt was removed as a recognized specific diagnosis, and redefined as a significant symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

I first started thinking about – and noticing – survivor’s guilt in Bosnia-Herzegovina where I met friend after friend who displayed its heart-wrenching symptoms. They had all survived some aspects of war, but only some of them had survived shelling, violence, forced migration, and/or rape, and some of their family members and friends had not survived at all. “Why,” they asked, sometimes silently and sometimes aloud, “did I survive and she didn’t?” “If I hadn’t left to go to school,” someone might ask, “maybe they would have taken me and not her.” To be glad about something like that is mind-blowingly difficult, especially when there are faces in your mind of those “real” victims, who used to sit across from you in the second grade, or slept with you when she was scared. These same friends were also surviving, sort of, a postwar period when so many of their friends and family or even kinsmen had not. To combat it, many of them used a combination of humor, grace, activism, education, alcohol, video games, anger, and/or apathy. They were tired and hungry, hungry not for food, for I was there after the war, but for peace of mind, a sense that it would truly and deeply be okay. It never really was (what society IS truly at peace?), but my friends got better, with time and support and each other. After all, they survived. I continued to notice survivor’s guilt among refugees, especially friends who were refugees, in South Dakota, when I worked as a case manager for a refugee resettlement agency. There are countless manifestations of it, too many for this post.

I do not say the following lightly, as a literary tool to make me sound deep, sophisticated, worldly even: I have not, and I hope that I never will survive the kinds of violence that exist in this insane world, but I do feel like I’m experiencing survivor’s guilt, again (empathy’s a bitch), but differently this time. I’m feeling survivor’s guilt from the PhD and job. The recession has made getting a job in academia more difficult than ever. To get a job is strange algorithm of often unknown components: hard work, sure, connections, definitely, skill, maybe, and who knows what else? The message these days is that once you get a (tenure-track) job, you should be grateful for it everyday. Instead of reveling in the fact that I have a job, and dealing with inevitable challenges as they come, I’m tired ALL THE TIME and I feel guilty for it because I’m supposed to be happy and grateful that I’m doing what I love, what I’ve been trained (and well) to do! I’m not in another country. I speak the language here (sort of). Why am I so tired? Maybe it’s because I just finished a PhD; because I am still dealing with a flea infestation that was not my doing (it’s much, much better but not gone); because I don’t know anyone here and building close friendships takes time (there are cool people here but true friendship takes time); because I’m teaching two new classes in a new school in a new semester system (16 weeks instead of a 10), in new time periods (50-minute rather than 80-minute classes), and most relevant of all, because I’m teaching to a very different body of students than my last institution. But I have a job!!! Whoo hoo!

I made the mistake of offering only a midterm and a final (in addition to other projects, quizzes, and so on). I also wrote multiple choice exams for the first time in my life knowing full well that they could not measure the kind of concepts I taught my students to understand, and I had them take it on a weird online testing system because I thought that students at this university valued technology more than I did. These were all poor choices on my part and I will remedy them for the final. The midterms were too long and too challenging. I did not know that my students were not following me until now. Now that they have a grade to measure our mutual lack of understanding, they’re pissed off. And I’m tired. So tired. We’re all on this strange, steep learning curve with no seat belt and we all have to figure out how to get off the ride alive. I have received helpful information about my job, more than I can follow. Again, there are supportive, fun people here, but they cannot yet compare to the community I left behind because we simply do not know each other well enough yet. Like my students, I’m finding it difficult to know how much I don’t know, how to ask questions about that which I don’t know that I’m supposed to know, and even being evaluated on (I’ll save that for another post).

Students tell me that my class is not what they expected, not what they were told it would be. They don’t like being challenged in a way that they weren’t expecting. They were expecting more film, more sociology (sub cultures), and I gave them Culture and political economy. I won’t apologize for it, but I have lost a lot of sleep over it. They are not pleased, and yet they acknowledge that they are learning. Learning’s a bitch too. I’ll have to make changes to my curriculum and teaching style so that the learning is less painful, more gradual and subtle, but it won’t happen this term and in the mean time, I have to put on a grateful face, a confident face, a funny face to lighten the mood. After all, I have a job!

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