The Real Reason I’m Obsessed with Reality Television—It’s All in the Details

My favorite book is Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. It’s actually a young adult book I first read in sixth grade. It’s about four siblings ages 7-13 who are abandoned by their mentally ill mother in a broken-down station wagon parked at a mall. The family is dirt poor. Having written their great Aunt’s address on the paper bags holding their clothes, the eldest, Dicey, decides that they need to head toward her home where hopefully their lost mother will be waiting. The bulk of the book is about how the four siblings walk hundreds of miles up the Atlantic Coast, and how they find food, shelter, and hope in dire circumstances. As an adult I became aware that my own mother has a serious mental illness which often interfered with her caring for us properly and thus realized this was one part of the book I could relate to. However, the aspect of the plot that I most identify with is the theme of: how to use limited resources to meet your basic needs.
Growing up, I had to do just that. And it is that creativity and satisfaction of surviving hostile environments that I know intimately and which endlessly fascinates me in other people’s stories. And while Survivor is the quintessential survivor experience, I find all reality television shows to have essentially the same theme, whether taking place locked away in the Big Brother house or on the runway competing for a modeling contract. All of these contestants are trying to stay sane and to achieve a very difficult goal within the constraints of their unhealthy environments.
In my childhood, we rarely had meals cooked and served. There was usually food in the fridge, although it was sometimes out of date and spoiled. I had to forage in the kitchen, sometimes cutting up a green pepper and having it with a hunk of cheese for my dinner. There was a survival mentality in my house. I would hide clean towels in my room because my mother would feel free to take whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, and to avoid being left in a lurch (needing a clean towel to shower before school) I resorted to being sneaky and devious to get my basic needs met. When I watch contestants scouring the beach for food and going to extreme measures to get what they need, I recognize this behavior on a primitive emotional level. I rejoice with that person when he finally gets the coconut open and gets the liquid to his parched lips.
Homecoming is filled with delightful details with intricate descriptions of using limited resources to meet one’s basic needs:
They’d have to conserve money and food. Quickly she calculated a way to eat only half of the food tonight and the rest for their next dinner. No more Cokes, either; they’d cost sixty cents. No more small markets; they were more expensive. They could fish in Long Island Sound or the rivers (string and a hook, they’d have to buy those), and why didn’t she have a knife? Pg 30
Someone else might find these details mundane and boring. I find them thrilling.
This fascination with survival and making do is a theme that permeates my work and my art. My adult life has consisted of many hardships—physical, emotional, and mental. In every case, I was somehow able to transform that struggle into something affirming and sustaining. The main reason I’m a therapist is that I know in my core that it is possible to survive and even thrive in the throes of adversity. The art medium I engage in most has to do with found objects. I automatically look at everything as a potential art material. I take the plastic bits from the box my printer came in. I see the left-over nuts and bolts of my assembled table as salvageable. I guess I believe that almost everything is salvageable. And thus every piece of one’s life contains the possibility of being transformed into something better. It’s this possibility for transformation that stands at the heart of who I am and what I do.