Sometimes I feel like a survivor. I feel like I’m beating this thing—I’m beating all of these things—with a strength that I’m finding down inside of myself somewhere. I feel like I’m going to be okay. I feel like I have a glimpse of what life used to be like. I feel like I can breathe again. And I feel like I’m fit—like I’m allowed—to talk on the subject of how to get through something like this because I’m actually going to get through it.
Sometimes I feel, instead, like it’s all just survival mode. I feel like I’m grasping at everything I can just to make it through the day. I feel like I can barely keep my head above the water. I feel like the language that is being spoken around me—the language that I have known my entire life—is foreign to me. And it takes every last ounce of energy just to keep up. I feel like I’m just going through the motions. I feel like I’m not the one to talk about making it through because I’m not sure that I’m going make it.
It’s crazy how to two words that are seemingly so similar can evoke such different emotions. How one can make me feel like I’m the toughest thing in my life and the other can make me feel like I’m nothing against the toughest thing in my life. How one can make me feel like I’m in first place and the other can make me feel like I’m being lapped for the fifth time. The difference is extreme. And the heartbreak is extreme when I go from one to the other—from survivor to survival.
But when you really think about it, both are important. A survivor can’t be called a survivor without first having survived something. So I need these survival mode days in order to get to the point where I’m truly a survivor.
And I will get there. One day I’ll get there. And if you are in a back and forth between survivor and survival mode, you will get there too. I know it.
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