Life Beyond Survival

I’ve recently developed a passion for learning more about myself. I choose to be deeply self-aware. Not because it’s easy, but because I want to understand how I work, why I work the way I do, and most importantly, what I can do about it.

Recently, I sat with some raw truths that cut straight to the heart of who I am and how I move through the world.

Survival as Identity

I realized that much of my identity has been built on surviving rejection while doing everything in my power to avoid it.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to reject myself first so no one else could beat me to it. I put on masks, not to deceive others, but to protect myself from betrayal.

I test people without meaning to: Will they notice I’m struggling without me saying it? Will they stay if I don’t spell it out? But when they fail those unspoken tests, I feel confirmed in my deepest fears—that I am destined to be unseen and unloved.

The Double Bind

Here’s the trap: I want intimacy, truth, and unconditional love. Yet my inner rulebook whispers, “If I show too much, I’ll be left. If I show too little, I’ll be invisible.”

So I end up doing both. Revealing just enough to seem vulnerable, but never enough to truly risk closeness. And in the process, I sabotage the very connections I crave, not because I don’t care, but because my nervous system mistakes intimacy for danger.

The Wound Beneath It All

When I peel back the layers, I see the source. I wasn’t just unloved in my formative years, I was dehumanized. Manipulated instead of mirrored. Gaslit instead of guided. I learned that love was not constant; it was currency.

To earn it, I had to stay silent. To keep it, I had to obey. To protect it, I had to abandon myself. That became my blueprint.

Even now, as an adult, I find myself trading authenticity for temporary safety.

The Hardest Truth About Life Beyond Survival

What unsettles me most is the possibility that I don’t fully want to be healed, not yet. Healing would mean letting go of the very systems that have kept me alive: control, self-protection, loyalty to my pain. My pain has been my skin, my constant, my proof that I can endure.

But deep down, I also know that clinging to pain is what keeps me reenacting abandonment; by abandoning myself first.

Asking the Unflinching Question

I am not broken. I am someone whose wiring was shaped by trauma to believe that brokenness is safer than vulnerability. But safety is not the same thing as living.

So here’s the question I now sit with, one that terrifies and excites me at the same time:

What would I become if I stopped surviving?

And maybe, just maybe, that’s where the next chapter of my self-awareness begins.

Poetry Collection: Life Beyond Survival