Survival Mode & What it Takes to Be Alive

I’ve been in this really weird place recently. Weird might not be the right word here. I’m still searching for it.

I’ve been sitting in a place between happiness and depression.

Between abundance & never enoughnesss.

About a week and a half ago things at work took another turn, and I found myself slipping into overwork mode.

The thing is, I recognized the switch into my former self.

Into hyperproductivity, and not taking breaks, and de-prioritizing things like self-care and a full night’s sleep and home-cooked food.

I found myself back in the mode where the only thing that gets prioritized is my job.

The mode where I wrap up my day and instead of washing my face, moisturizing, praying & listening to an audiobook to fall asleep — these acts of care for myself are instead replaced with plugging in my computer & setting my alarm for as early as I think my brain will allow me to wake back up so I can go back to work.

I’m not proud of making the shift.

How can I be proud of something that’s so automatic I don’t even consciously recognize that its happened until I’m immersed in it?

And on the same token – how can I be ashamed of it?

But I am. I am ashamed of it.

I hate the fact that hyperindependence, hyperproductivity & workaholism is my default.

I’ve talked about this a little on this blog and on social media, around exploring what it means to show up in the world without my value and worth being tied to what I can do for other people.

To how productive I am.

To making myself indispensable at work.

I feel like I’ve untied a lot of those associations, and yet ten days ago I went from decent boundaries to zero boundaries between work and life in a matter of minutes.

It happened so fast it was like stepping into the life of another person. Someone I recognized, but that I don’t know anymore.

I’ve started to explore this concept of pleasure mode. Instead of hustle mode – living a life full of leisure and rest and play and pleasure.

Things that don’t come easily or intuitively to me at all.

So even though I know that that’s super important to me, and I have to actively work every day on cultivating a lifestyle around pleasure, I still went back to overworking.

Why?

Why can’t I make play and pleasure and rest stick in my life?

Why is it so hard for that to be the default?

I know there are many layers to healing & understanding ourselves, but the fact that this theme keeps coming up in my life is fucking frustrating.

I don’t want to be the person who works herself to the bone.

I pulled up a bunch of quotes around boundaries and work/life balance (even though balance is a myth) — and the one that stuck out the most to me was one by Dolly Parton.

“Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”

What is that? A life outside of work?

Even though I struggle to create that, to maintain it — I understand it. I know what it looks like although I’ve never personally experienced it.

So as I was thinking about that — knowing what it looks like to have a life I enjoy & that I’m proud of living — even though it’s not clear the path I need to take to get there — I had a breakthrough.

I’ve done the work around my mindset when it comes to looking at work as my only value on this planet.

I’ve done the work in stepping back from my relationships and not fighting for the ones that clearly aren’t willing or able to fight for me too.

So when I slipped back into overwork mode last week, it wasn’t because I felt like I had something to prove to my company.

I didn’t work back-to-back 16–20 hour days to show them I’m valuable.

I did it to survive.

Because it was easier to dive into the work, to give up my life, my freedom, my free time, my pleasure, than it was to keep fighting with them on boundaries.

It was easier to shut down my own needs then it was to speak up, again, as I’ve done countless times before, and often on deaf ears. (Professionally & personally throughout my whole life.)

As I worked nonstop, only taking breaks to scarf down food or go to the bathroom before returning to the hustle, I wasn’t thinking that taking care of myself or having fun wasn’t important.

Quite the contrary, actually.

I felt pretty damn guilty about not being able to yank myself out of hyperwork mode.

And then I realized – I wasn’t choosing work over everything else.

I was choosing survival.

The whole time I kept thinking, “I just have to get through it.”

I kept thinking about the fact that it feels like I only have one choice — of getting through it, because not getting through it, not pushing through, not working excessively, meant that things could get worse.

That my job could be at risk. That my livelihood could be at risk.

That my utilities, which are already behind because I don’t make enough to pay all my bills with my primary job, could be shut off.

That I’d have to choose between heat & electric in the middle of the winter.

Anytime a thought popped up about anything other than work, I dismissed it with, “Just get through it.”

Because my body didn’t recognize the alarm bells at work as being DIFFERENT then the alarm bells in life.

I’m working really hard every day on retraining my nervous system. But it’s not her fault that right now, we’re permanently in survival mode.

I can’t even blame myself, my nervous system, my trauma-addled brain, for being in this default.

For slipping back in.

For something overpowering my conscious thought & fighting a battle with myself to understand what it means to survive.

Because I’ve started to take stock:

I met the first person who rattled my safety & security when I was four years old.

They abused me for almost a decade, before I was kicked out and went to live in a shelter at 13.

Before I found out I was half adopted and lived in 20 different places over the course of four years as a teenager.

Before I was committed to multiple psych wards because I hated myself and that scared my parents, even though they contributed to that hatred.

When I finally learned to shut up – to stop speaking up, because I wouldn’t be believed anyway — I went off to college.

I went off to a new experience that cost a lot more money, that I wasn’t ready for, that I asked not to have to do, and where I was told I didn’t have a choice.

It was college or the street.

So I figured it out. I made a new life at school.

And then I was raped by a friend.

And then my “friends” didn’t believe me when I told them it happened.

So I didn’t believe myself either.

Until I ended up almost dead, my stomach being pumped and my freedom being taken away because I couldn’t be trusted with protecting my one precious life at 20.

And then I met someone else who seemed to want me. To like me. To maybe even, one day, consider loving me.

But that person hurt me too, and then broke into my house when I tried to end things and stole all my worldly possessions.

And then I met someone who I thought was so good, so pure, so chivalrous.

Until, less than two months in, they decided they only wanted a part of me. The sexual part, while they got back together with the real love of their life.

A few months after that, I met the most charming and confusing person I’ve ever known. Someone else who would “love” me, sometimes more than I could love myself.

And they hurt me too. Repeatedly, and because that’s all I’ve ever known, I thought that was normal.

That fighting to survive was normal.

And with each passing year, each relationship, each reaffirmation that this was how to make a life – to get through it, to survive, that this was all that would ever be afforded to me because I was certainly not worthy of anything more — that became ingrained in me.

Just get through it.

Just survive.

And then I got out – and I went to stay with a friend.

And there was a part of my heart that was opened up in that experience, in being able to sit with nature and laugh without worrying that I was being too loud.

But my nervous system was never fully settled. How could it be?

I knew I could get the boot at any time – and five months in, I got my notice. I had six weeks to get out.

So I figured it out again. I got through it. I made decisions I would’ve preferred not to make, indebting me to people and places that now have a vice grip on my life.

I survived – I found a new home. My own home. A home that costs more than half of what I make, but it’s mine.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that after 28 years of:

Instability

Not being OK

Not having a home

Not being right

Not being heard

Feeling unlovable

Of just getting through it —

It’s going to take some time to find my way.

It’s going to take some time to figure out who I am.

To figure out what it means to show up as myself.

To figure out what it means not to survive – but to thrive.

To figure out how to live a life that’s not about making a living, but about being alive.