Who I Loved When I Was Still Surviving: Reclaiming Relational Truth

When I look back at the relationships I clung to in my earlier years, I can see it clearly now:

I wasn’t choosing people from my wholeness.

I was choosing them from my wounds.

Survival mode has its own gravity.

Its own chemistry.

Its own logic.

When you’re surviving, whether it’s high school politics, family chaos, social pressure, heartbreak, trauma, or a life that keeps asking you to bend, you don’t choose relationships with your heart. You choose them with your nervous system.

You find the people who feel familiar, not the people who feel healthy.

You match with whoever shares your loneliness, your fear, your urgency, your hunger to be seen in some way, even if it’s the wrong way.

And the connections feel intense.

Magnetic.

Fated.

But intensity isn’t intimacy.

It’s adrenaline-wearing cologne.

There’s a reason so many “deep” early relationships dissolve when you finally get safe:

They were built by the version of you who was still trying to survive something.

Survival-mode relationships are formed in the dark.

By instinct, not awareness.

By need, not compatibility.

By proximity, not purpose.

We find our people in high school because we’re all scrambling for a place to land.

We bond in tragedy because our fear syncs our heartbeat.

We become loyal in chaos because the shared pain feels like truth.

We cling to partners who remind us of the past because the pattern feels familiar, and familiar feels safe, even when it isn’t.

But healing rewrites the map.

When you’re no longer in survival mode, the relationships born from it start to look different.

Some feel too small.

Some feel too sharp.

Some feel too heavy.

Some feel like a costume you outgrew the second you learned how to breathe.

Thriving changes what you recognize as connection.

It changes what you tolerate.

It changes who you reach for, and who you quietly release.

Because once you’ve lived outside the storm, you realize not every bond built in the rain is meant to follow you into the sun.

Reclaiming relational truth required me to see which connections were born in survival mode rather than from who I truly am.

A Slice of Humble Pie

Not every person who held my hand in the dark is meant to walk with me in the light.

Reflection

Which of your relationships were chosen by the version of you who was still trying not to drown?

How does your healed self feel about the people your surviving self once clung to?

What changes when you choose connection from stability rather than fear?

Affirmation

I honor the relationships that helped me survive, and I choose relationships that let me thrive.