I’m Not a Survivor. I’m an Alchemist.
On the power of transmuting your pain into power.
I’ve never liked the term “victim” and I like the term “survivor” little better. Calling oneself a survivor conjures visions of clinging to a raft, punctured volleyball clutched to the side. While the metaphor holds, I’ve, personally, never felt like it fit for me as someone who experienced a lot of trauma early on in life.
Because I’ve never let my trauma strand me. Not really. I’ve never seen myself as being at the mercy of the people who failed me, or beholden to their pain and the things they got wrong.
For me, I’ve always seen it as a challenge. A choice.
Growing up painfully uncomfortable in the environment I was in, I instinctually knew it had to be different. There was no choice. If I stayed their course, I would die, at my hand most probably, drowned in the wave of misery that had swallowed up most of the rest. If I took a step off the cliff…who knows? Maybe survival, or at least a death with the perception of freedom.
I chose the latter.
Thrust into the wilds of life, I was forced to survive, in a way, but not in weakness. In strength. Instead of letting things like my childhood trauma, the years I spent getting things wrong in the wake of that trauma, become…
