the question “is surviving merely breathing?” comes from a google doc titled “taylor’s stream of consciousness for healing” which I made pretty immediately following my mother’s passing. For the first 6 months after she died, when I was wrestling with the raw, heavy grief that comes post a tremendous loss, this doc was my buoy - it was a place to immediately liberate myself from any thought, memory, idea, or word that I needed to let go. It was my life line, my cathartic release. One day, I was thinking about how I knew I was living, I could tell I was alive, I mean I was here, I was breathing, but outside of that I felt so empty, like I didn’t know what to do or how to move forward. That day I wrote in the doc:

“the bizarreness of working your ass off to survive once someone else’s survival is stripped from them, their survival yanked from you. all you can do is find your way to survival. but what does that even mean? is surviving merely breathing? or is it deeper. how does one survive successfully after a death? Everyone says they are impressed with how I am doing, that I am doing great - but what’s the scale? ”

So this billboard, written in her handwriting, is a tribute to my mama. It’s a nod to those days when you don’t really feel like doing the damn thing, when you’re operating at base level, but you’re going to turn on and fumble into the dark anyways, because you must. You know you’ll snap out of it one day, that you will return to operating at normal or even high frequency, but for now .. just be thankful for the breath.