Survivor
“I don’t remember when childhood ended; sometimes I wonder if it ever had the chance to begin.”
It’s just mutated into something quieter, something that I learned how to sit still at the dinner table and say, “I’m fine,” without choking. One day I was a child, and the next I was someone who knew how to read a room better than a textbook, who could measure danger in tone, footsteps, and silence.
People like to imagine trauma as a loud, dramatic event. Mine was more disciplined than that. It showed up every day, on time, consistently. Like a job, the background noise you stop noticing until someone turns it off and the silence feels wrong. Home was not a place; it was a test of endurance. Love came with conditions, anger came without warning, and safety was more of a theoretical concept than a lived experience. A parent who never forgets their responsibilities, except their responsibility was to break, not build. It was inconsistent love one moment, hostility the next. It teaches you something valuable: not how to trust, but how to anticipate betrayal.
I learned early that pain is easier to manage when you can predict it. Unfortunately, people are not predictable, not parents, not lovers, not strangers on the street who think your body is public property. So I adapted. I shrank where necessary, disappeared when possible, and performed when required. Survival, it turns out, is a very creative skill. I became efficient early. Efficient at shrinking, at apologizing for things I didn’t do, at making myself smaller so other people could feel bigger. Survival is, at its core, a performance art. And I was very, very good at it.
By the time I was a teenager, I had already mastered the art of dissociation, the ability to be present and absent at the same time. It’s a useful trick when your reality feels like something you didn’t consent to. It also makes you very good at smiling in photographs. “Smiles are easy when they’re not entirely yours.”
I had a skill set most people don’t put on resumes. Being physically present while mentally filing paperwork somewhere far away. It’s useful when your reality feels like a poorly written script you didn’t audition for.
Drugs came later, not as rebellion but as relief. People say addiction is about escape, but that’s lazy thinking. That’s not entirely true. Sometimes it’s about wanting to feel something, anything that isn’t emptiness or fear or the echo of things you can’t unremember. It’s strange how society condemns the coping mechanism more than the pain that created it. Sometimes it’s about negotiation, trying to strike a deal with your own mind: “Give me five minutes without the noise, and I’ll survive the rest.”
At eighteen, I made a decision that people will debate endlessly in classrooms, courtrooms, bedrooms, and therapy rooms, but none of them were in that room with me. None of them had my history sitting quietly beside them, influencing every thought. It wasn’t a moral dilemma; it was survival, again. It always comes back to that.
Relationships? They didn’t heal me. They mirrored what I already knew.
Turns out, when violence is your first language, you become fluent in it. I mistook intensity for care, control for protection. Stayed longer, explained more, forgave faster. It’s impressive, really, how the human brain can recreate familiar damage and label it “love.”
There’s a certain irony in searching for comfort in the very patterns that broke you.
Social isolation wasn’t a choice at first. It was a side effect. People don’t always know what to do with someone who carries too much. Eventually, solitude becomes easier than explaining yourself over and over again. It’s quieter there. Less judgment, fewer expectations.
Public harassment, bullying, and abuse blurred together over time. Different faces, same script. It’s almost boring in its predictability. If it weren’t so exhausting, it would be fascinating.
Sexuality became… complicated. When your body has been treated like ownership, you learn to detach, to intellectualize, and to observe yourself like an outsider. Almost like I was writing a report on my own existence to analyze my own suffering like a case study. Maybe that’s the only way to make IT useful: to turn pain into something that can be understood, categorized, maybe even prevented for someone else.
Here’s the part no one tells you: you don’t become “strong” in the way people admire. You become functional; you wake up, you perform, you exist. You learn how to operate despite everything. You develop a sense of humor that makes people uncomfortable because it’s too honest. You become self-aware to a fault and emotionally intelligent because you had to be, the kind that sits a little too close to the truth. not because you wanted to grow, but because not understanding people had consequences.
Healing isn’t linear. It’s not even always visible. Some days it looks like progress. Other days it looks like making things worse. Occasionally, it looks like doing absolutely nothing and that, somehow, being enough.
If this letter sounds composed, it’s because I’ve had a lot of time to think. Trauma does that; it gives you time, long, quiet stretches where your only company is your own memory. You learn to organize it, categorize it, and make sense of it. Not because it fixes anything, but because chaos is harder to live with when it’s unnamed.
I am not a lesson. I am not a statistic. I am not a “case.”
I am what happens when survival becomes a personality.
And despite everything — I am still here.
Just… here.
Not as inspiration. Not as tragedy.
- Sphoorti U.