It’s Time To Do More Than Just Survive Your Life

“The habits you created to survive will no longer serve you when it’s time to thrive.”

I read this quote on Instagram a few months ago and it has played a fundamental role in the way I continue to not only heal, but also how I see myself. After reading that, I started to reflect on where my most sensitive wounds were held- and like so many others, rejection and not being chosen fell at the very top of the list. I did some further research around rejection and found countless articles that stunned me. It turns out, everyone feels rejection. It also turns out, everyone has always felt rejection.

You see, back in the hunter-gatherer days being rejected did in fact affect your means to survive. If people were rejected by a tribe, their quality of life was more than likely to go down or fail all together. This is where survival mode kicked in when needing to cope and move forward with the lack of belonging.

To this day, thousands of people turn to fight or flight mode when undergoing loss, a breakup, or any uncomfortable change. We often times mistake transition as a threat to our survival, but those just aren’t the days we live in anymore. Sometimes even in present times my body is still triggered when I am not being chosen (wether that be issues with my father, a job opportunity, a failed friendship/relationship) and I am convinced that without that particular thing, my quality of life is not going to be as good or I am going to be missing something.

This just isn’t the case.

We live in a time where our life is not going to be threatened if we are rejected, or not picked. We live in a time where belonging is completely essential for our emotional health, but we will not starve just because we are not loved back by our partner. Our quality of life is not going to dwindle just because we are not chosen by outside sources.

However, if we want to thrive, we must choose ourselves. We must navigate our passions, what we want to do as an occupation, what we want for ourselves, and we must provide ourselves with the chocolate cake when our cravings are yelling at us to spoil them.

We are humans, and the era that we exist in is one where we can let our fight or flight mode take a nap. We do not have to live on the edge, ready to flee at any moment or feel our ability to live is threatened (like- we won’t survive without _____). Our ability to consume food, water, and shelter, as well as our sense of belonging and our need for connection, no longer has to lye in the hands of rejection or the situations we are not chosen in.

If we want to thrive, this is the journey we must embark on with ourselves. We must put our survival tools down just long enough to feel how powerful and capable we really are. We must acknowledge our own resilience without the habits we’ve created in the fear of not existing.

We will exist despite all outside loss, rejection, and change – if we use our power to do so.

“The habits you created to survive will no longer serve you when it’s time to thrive.”