By Brian Ashburn
With each passing day in quarantine, I’m slowly becoming my mother.
Okay let me back up: My favorite show is Survivor.
If you haven’t watched it and are only aware of it culturally, I implore you to put your phone down, do ten sit-ups, then binge the entire series. It is the most incredible study in human behavior, how we react to challenges and interact with one another when given limited food, nowhere to sleep, and only the clothes on our backs. They are trapped together, on an island, for up to 39 days, and must work together to survive, but also slowly vote each other off one by one. Then at the end, everyone who has been backstabbed CHOOSES THE WINNER. It’s genius.
The real beauty of Survivor, however, is watching the evolution of these characters (who range from rural, Republican, chicken farmers to pampered, high-class former child stars) as they go into the game with noble intentions then morph into their primal selves, subconsciously becoming who they have to be to win the game. People promise things to one another then slit each other’s throats, people lie through their teeth then laugh about their sociopathy, people poop in the ocean (irrelevant yet, entirely relevant). You don’t know how you’re going to react to rain-drenched, sleepless nights in a jungle with nothing to eat but a scoop of rice and nothing to live on but the dream of one million dollars. All you have to do is outwit, outplay, and outlast your island-mates for 39 days.
(Doesn’t 39 days sound so quaint right about now?)
I’ve applied several times, which involves making a very self-indulgent, highly produced yet completely natural audition tape where I find the skinniest lighting and talk about how I’d win the game. So, I’ve spent countless hours reflecting on who I am as a person, what makes me CrazySexyCool, and how I’d truly react to the conditions of the game. All these years, I believed I’d be the goofball, tension-breaking comedy writer who’d find a way to connect with both the Buddhist, stay-at-home cat-moms and the neonazi lumberjacks alike, forming bonds that would only be broken by my own hand as I slowly slayed my enemies and quietly betrayed my allies with cunning, bold moves. America would fall in love with me, I’d be invited on Kelly Clarkson’s talk show where she’d surprise me with Taylor Swift, and I’d use the million dollars to pay off the student loans of everyone I loved. (Okay, it’s only a million dollars, so I guess three lucky people in my life?)
And yet, here we are in IRL Survivor, trapped in a confined space with few people, limited resources, and no ocean to poop in, and I’ve reached that moment in the game where everything has shifted, and the veneer I’ve carefully crafted for myself has fallen away, exposing my innate instincts. It’s at this crossroads when I realized: I am my mother.
Not physically, you pervs -- although my body now craves vegetables (?) and could absolutely pull off the ‘80s perm she rocked in her twenties with grace and ease.
In a time of crisis, I become a mother of four, a nurturer concerned with others’ well-beings over my own. I heat a blanket in the dryer before snuggling in my boyfriend for movie night (a movie I let him pick). I hear people’s worries and coo them with words of comfort. I cook meals, then get mad when my roommates don’t immediately come sit down when I announce it’s ready. I hold a fundraiser for the local food bank and rally my friends to donate. I do all the grocery shopping, and buy little treats I know they’ll love as a thoughtful surprise waiting in the cabinets. I remember people’s birthdays (lol jk thanks for being good at one thing, Facebook). I do laundry without announcing that I’m doing it in order to elicit praise.
I. Scrub. The. Kitchen. Sink. While. Listening. To. Fleetwood. Mac.
As I organized our junk drawer (because I had time and couldn’t stand not finding AAA batteries when I needed them), I had a true moment of gratitude toward my mother for keeping a household running and four kids alive. She wasn’t going to Osteria La Buca on Friday nights, or asking Noah Baumbach pretentious questions at a screening, or writing screenplays that nobody will make. She made sure we had a healthy, happy childhood, so we could grow up to be healthy, happy adults who got to go to Osteria La Buca on Friday nights, and ask Noah Baumbach pretentious questions at a screening, and write screenplays that nobody will make.
I might be on my own island, and my parents may be 2,000 miles away, but they spent my whole life training me to be good when a terrible, sad, debilitating event came, and to do what they do: pass that love on to the people around me. I’ve been surprised at how calm I’ve been throughout this pandemic, but of course I am; we are all the products of our upbringings, and when challenges are put in front of us, we must rise to the occasion and meet them with the grace and dignity of our parents, grandparents, teachers, doctors, loved ones, waitresses in order to honor them and make the situation a little less shitty for everyone else.
If Barb were ever on Survivor, I think she would form alliances and blindly trust her people, only to be voted out third. And you know what? She would leave wishing them all good luck and leave behind her sweatshirt for the tiny ad exec who only packed a bikini.
So maybe that’s my destiny. When we get out of this quarantine, and I spend the next two years shedding the 30 pounds I’ve put on by eating bread and chocolate every day, and I finally get the call from Jeff Probst to get on that island and survive, I will make sure others have the comfiest dirt in the shelter, and tell people they matter, and I will be voted off with my head held high and my heart on my sleeve, and hopefully, my perm blowing in the wind.
Brian is a TV writer in LA whose biggest TV success to date is winning a car on Let’s Make a Deal. He loves true crime, playing soccer, Taylor Swift, and s’mores. He’s from Brainerd, Minnesota, where he was voted Best Personality of his senior class, an honor that his father said is only given to ugly people to make them feel better about themselves.