The Loneliness of Survival

Survival is often portrayed as strength, but it can also be profoundly lonely. When you escape something that nearly destroys you, you enter a world that doesn’t understand what you’ve lived through. You feel like you don’t fit into the jigsaw puzzle that everyone else fits. You learn to smile through pain. You learn to hide the truth. You learn to carry your story quietly because you don’t know who will believe it - or who will judge it.

I recall distinctly feeling like I did not belong. I was in my 20s but did not fit with my peers. I didn’t have the university experience or the rites of passage teenagers go through as they become young adults. My canvas was just as full but with different experiences. I found it difficult to relate.

Loneliness was one of the hardest parts of my journey. Not the physical loneliness, but the emotional kind - the kind that comes from knowing your life has split into a before and an after and no one around you can see the divide.

Writing my memoir helped me bridge that divide. It helped me speak. It helped me connect. It helped me stop surviving alone.