I Was Not a Victim. I Was in Training.

I didn’t grow up believing I was strong.
I grew up believing I had to survive.

There’s a difference.

Strength is something people admire from the outside. Survival is something you build in the dark, quietly, when no one is coming to save you. As a child, I didn’t have language for what was happening to me. I didn’t know words like trauma, abuse, or dysfunction. What I knew was this: I needed to pay attention. I needed to adapt. I needed to stay alive.

Looking back now, as an adult, I can see that what felt like chaos was actually training. Not the kind anyone should ever endure, but training, nonetheless. Every lie I was forced to decode. Every silence I had to read. Every night I learned not to sleep too deeply. Every moment I learned to watch faces, moods, footsteps, tone. Those weren’t weaknesses forming. Those were survival skills my instincts were learning, perfecting, mastering.

I don’t use the word victim for myself. Not because what happened wasn’t real, oh, it was. And it was brutal. I don’t use it because it freezes me in the moment of harm. It traps me in what was done to me. I survived by focusing on what I could do for myself. That instinct didn’t come from bravery. It came from necessity. It came from years, and years of the same repetitive abuse programming into my brain that I had to survive. Always.

As a child, I learned early that trust could be dangerous. From the age of 1 until age 5ish, I was taught love. I learned there was an almighty God, who would always protect over me if I prayed. I was taught he would be there, no matter what and keep me from harm’s way. I learned of creativity, and building imaginary worlds, that I could play in. I sold candy, lemonade with my siblings, built snow forts, and sandcastles. But after the age of six, I learned about death, marriage, lies, deceit, affairs, and that a child can become a tool, used to hurt others. A child could be a constant reminder of an affair. A child can be the product of that affair. And, that product, could be a constant reminder to the person who was cheated on. I was taught adults could lie “for your own good.” Like when telling you, those were your siblings, those were your parents. Or they lie to cover up what they are doing to a child that they hated more than life itself. Or maybe they lie to “protect” you from others that are coming to harm you. That protection often came with conditions or disappeared entirely.

That kind of childhood doesn’t produce blind faith in people. It produces vigilance. It produces mistrust. And yes, it produces walls. Walls so tall even your own children will have a hard time getting through them. Sometimes, especially your own children. It is a deep, alteration of your personality that will hinder you from friendships, work relationships, and most of all, sexual relationships. Finding true love, will be something “that will never happen to me.” Instead, I found myself choosing bad situations, because they were familiar.

Those walls didn’t mean I lacked love. Despite what most would think, and most did think. It meant, I didn’t know how to love.

In fact, the irony is this: even with all of the things I had endured, empathy grew alongside my mistrust. I can feel sadness in a room before anyone speaks. I can sense danger before it arrives. I can feel when someone is broken, even when they smile. And I have a constant urge, to help them through their problems, because there are very few problems, I have not personally faced at one point or another. That level of empathy isn’t softness, weakness. It’s a gift of awareness sharpened by experience.

I learned humility because survival humbles you. When you know how quickly everything can be taken, you stop assuming anything is owed to you. When you lose people, you tend to take those close to you and never let them go, only to lose them in the end. You stop expecting fairness. You stop believing effort guarantees safety. That doesn’t make you bitter or negative, it makes you realistic.

And love? Love became something I guarded fiercely. I didn’t give it easily. Not because I didn’t feel deeply, but because I felt deeply. Love, when you’re young and unsafe, can be used as leverage. So, I learned to love quietly. Carefully. Selectively. To hold every feeling and emotion inside. Until it burst, backfired, and ultimately led me down extremely bad paths.

There’s a cost to that kind of upbringing. I won’t pretend there isn’t. Mistrust doesn’t evaporate just because the danger is gone. Hyper-awareness doesn’t switch off. Survival skills don’t politely retire when childhood ends. They follow you into adulthood, into relationships, into work, into the way you see the world. But most of all, it follows you into parenthood. The worst one.

But the good news is, there is also power in understanding why you are the way you are. And using it to your own advantage.

I wasn’t broken.
I was trained.

Trained to think fast.
Trained to endure.
Trained to feel deeply and still stand.
Trained to survive hell without becoming it.

I was trained, to build worlds, worlds that I could see, escape into, and ultimately share with others. I once built that world in a 70,000 sq. ft. building, hoping to share with others like me. But life had other plans for me. So now, I am going to use this blog, to bring you into my world, and show you, you too can survive.

This blog isn’t about reliving pain for the sake of pain. It’s about translating survival into understanding. About showing that the traits people sometimes judge, guardedness, intensity, mistrust, emotional distance, often began as tools that kept someone alive. Tools they now use every day, to continue to survive.

If you recognize yourself in this, know this: nothing about you formed by survival is shameful. Some of it may need healing. Some of it may need softening. But none of it means you are weak. In fact, it means the opposite.

You’re here. You survived. You beat the monsters you faced.
And that means something inside you learned how to endure.

That’s where The Journey To Survival begins. It is time to let the past go, and to begin the journey of healing. I pray my stories, my jokes, my journey gives you the strength to overcome any demons you are facing. I pray it gives you the strength to see, no matter what life throws at you, you have the strength within yourself, to be anything you want to be.

Love – Raven Sapphire