If You’re Reading This, You’re a Survivor

Over the long holiday weekend, someone left a comment on an old post, that happened to also be the 1,000th comment on this iteration of the blog. I won’t go into the whole comment that was left, but the opening line of the comment left me thinking:

I cannot say that I’m a survivor, I’m still alive. That’s it.

In responding to the comment, my first thought was, well if you can survive the childhood you lived through, then yes, you are a survivor. Survivor’s don’t necessarily have all the answers, and survivors aren’t the folks who have spent years healing, and who seem to have figured out some way to struggle less with their demons, and survivors certainly don’t all have “happy” lives.

Survivors are those of us who have lived through the horrors of an abusive childhood, and yet still keep going. Being a survivor of child abuse does not depend on having a nice, healthy, drama-free, adult life. It does depend on going forward. How tragic would it be for us to have the strength and character to survive a childhood full of abuse only to allow it to destroy us later in life? It doesn’t have to be that way.

You are strong, you are resilient, you have gotten through a childhood that many others could not, and moved into adulthood despite attempts to crush you as a child. If that’s not something to be proud of, if that’s not “surviving”, then I don’t know what is.