🧸 The Audacity Of Surviving | A Short Story

 

There is a particular kind of arrogance people carry when they are certain your ending will be ugly.

You can see it in the way they watch you after they’ve done their damage, the way they linger just long enough to witness the first fracture but never long enough to help clean up what they broke. Some of them do it openly, with a cruelty so obvious it almost feels easier to name. Others hide it behind concern, behind carefully chosen words and soft expressions, as if destruction becomes less destructive when it arrives wearing the face of love.

But the arrogance is always there.

The quiet assumption that this will be the thing that finishes you.

That this betrayal, this abandonment, this humiliation, this grief, whatever shape it took, will finally be enough to knock you flat and keep you there. They watch the cracks forming and begin preparing themselves for your collapse the way some people wait for a storm they’ve already decided is inevitable.

Some even handed me the hammer.

That’s the part I think about most often now, not just the pain itself, but the names they gave it while it was happening. They called it love when they tore pieces from me and asked me to thank them for the lesson. They called it honesty when they weaponized my tenderness and used it to justify their cruelty. They called it fate when they wanted me to believe there was something noble or necessary about the suffering they helped create.

People are very good at renaming harm when it allows them to avoid accountability.

And for a while, I believed them.

That might be the hardest part to admit, not that I was wounded, but that I stood in the wreckage of myself and tried to convince my own heart that maybe this was what growth was supposed to feel like. Maybe love was always a little brutal. Maybe betrayal was simply part of being close to other people. Maybe pain only meant I was learning.

But pain is not always a teacher.

Sometimes it is just pain.

Sometimes it is needless and deliberate and handed to you by people who knew exactly where to press.

And still-

I stayed.

Not with them. Never that.

I stayed with myself.

Even when I was the last person I wanted to be alone with.

Even when my own reflection looked like evidence of everything I had failed to outrun. Even when breathing felt less like instinct and more like labor, like each inhale had to be negotiated one trembling second at a time. There were days when survival did not look heroic. It looked like sitting on the floor with my back against the bed, staring at nothing, trying to convince my body that one more hour was manageable. It looked like washing my face and calling that progress. It looked like feeding myself when grief had made hunger feel irrelevant.

No one writes songs about that part.

No one romanticizes the ugly mechanics of continuing.

People love the polished version of resilience. They love the before and after, the neat transformation, the triumphant rise. They want healing to look cinematic, beautifully lit and spiritually profound, full of tearful breakthroughs and meaningful closure.

But the truth is less graceful than that.

Sometimes surviving means rebuilding yourself with trembling hands and crooked tools.

Sometimes it means using whatever scraps you have left; instinct, spite, memory, the faintest thread of hope and making something barely livable out of them until livable slowly becomes real again. Sometimes it means waking up inside a life that no longer feels like yours and deciding, with no certainty at all, to remain anyway.

That is what I did.

I stitched my name back into places it had been nearly erased from. Into routines that no longer recognized me. Into a body that had learned to carry tension like a second skeleton. Into a future that often felt too far away to trust. There were mornings when getting dressed felt like an act of rebellion, afternoons when laughter startled me with its unfamiliarity, nights when sleep only came after hours of bargaining with memories that refused to stay buried.

And still, I moved.

Slowly at first.

Then stubbornly.

Then with something sharper than hope and steadier than rage.

I moved because movement was the only proof I had that I was not done yet.

There is something almost offensive, I think, about continuing when the world expected your disappearance.

That’s what surviving taught me.

It takes audacity to remain where you were meant to vanish.

It takes audacity to look around at all the places people abandoned, dismissed, or diminished you and decide that your existence there is not an accident but a reclamation. It takes audacity to keep your heart alive after people treated it like a disposable thing. To keep making art, keep laughing too loudly, keep dreaming beyond what your circumstances ever promised you.

It takes audacity to hold joy in your mouth after they filled it with dirt.

I know this now because joy did not return to me all at once. It came back in fragments, suspicious and delicate, like an animal testing whether the room was safe enough to enter. The first time I laughed without guilt, it felt almost disloyal to the pain I had spent so long carrying. The first time I looked in the mirror and saw not damage but possibility, I had to look away again just to steady myself.

Healing is not always gentle when it arrives.

Sometimes it enters like permission.

Sometimes it enters like fury.

And sometimes it enters like a voice you barely recognize at first, standing in the middle of your own mind and saying, No. I am not done here.

That voice saved me more than once.

It rose up when apologies came too late and too hollow to matter. It rose up when people who had wounded me tried to return, not because they had changed, but because they thought I would still be small enough to fit inside the old version of myself they preferred. It rose up every time someone mistook my quiet for weakness, every time they assumed that because I was hurting, I was also powerless.

They misunderstood the silence.

Silence, I have learned, is not always surrender.

Sometimes it is strategy.

Sometimes it is exhaustion.

Sometimes it is the sound a person makes while gathering enough strength to survive the thing that was supposed to destroy them.

I have felt everything people said I should numb.

That is another lie they tell survivors, that survival requires shutting down, hardening completely, becoming some unfeeling version of yourself that can no longer be touched. They speak about numbness as if it is wisdom, as if detachment is the only respectable response to betrayal.

But I have not survived by feeling less.

I survived by feeling everything and refusing to let it kill me.

I have felt the weight of being forgotten by people I would have bled for. I have felt the sting of apologies shaped more like self-preservation than remorse. I have felt the slow, humiliating ache of realizing some people only ever loved the versions of me they could control-the quieter versions, the easier versions, the versions that made themselves smaller so everyone else could remain comfortable.

That kind of grief changes you.

Not because it empties you, but because it clarifies.

It teaches you what love is not.

It teaches you what staying should never cost.

It teaches you the difference between being wanted and being managed.

And once you know that, truly know it, there is no going back to the old hunger. No returning to tables where your dignity is the price of belonging. No shrinking yourself into something digestible for people who only know how to love what they can dominate.

That knowledge burns.

But it also frees.

So yes, I rise.

Not in the delicate, picturesque way people often imagine healing. Not as some serene creature draped in soft light and graceful acceptance. My healing did not arrive dressed like peace.

It came like fire.

Like truth dragged into the open after years of being buried alive.

Like finally hearing my own voice again and realizing it had teeth.

There were days when healing looked like rage before it looked like rest. Days when the only honest thing inside me was fury-fury at what had been done, fury at what I had tolerated, fury at how many people had benefited from my silence and then called me difficult the moment I found words.

And maybe that fury was necessary.

Maybe some people need softness to heal, and maybe others need flame.

I needed flame.

I needed something hot enough to cauterize the places that kept reopening every time I mistook access for love. I needed to stop confusing forgiveness with self-abandonment. I needed to say what happened out loud, even when my voice shook so badly it felt like the truth itself might splinter in my mouth.

Because healing is not just warm baths and quiet affirmations and learning how to breathe through the hard days.

Sometimes healing is finally telling the truth even if your voice breaks while you say it.

Sometimes healing is standing in front of your own life and refusing to disappear from it any longer.

And that, I think, is what they never saw coming.

Not the fact that I survived.

But the fact that I survived as myself.

That after all their efforts to flatten, define, reduce, and rewrite me, I still emerged with something wild and unmistakably mine intact. Maybe bruised. Maybe changed. Maybe louder than before. But mine.

That is the audacity of it.

Not just that I am here.

But that I am still becoming.

Still gathering the broken things and making something stronger out of them. Still choosing myself in ways I once begged other people to choose me. Still building a life from all the pieces they assumed would remain rubble forever.

They underestimated me.

And I understand why.

People who have only ever known power through control rarely know what to do with someone who survives without their permission. They mistake endurance for emptiness. They mistake silence for surrender. They mistake a bowed head for defeat when sometimes it is only the posture of a person learning where to place the weight before they rise.

So let them misunderstand.

Let them keep the version of the story where they thought I would vanish.

I know the truth now.

I know what it cost to remain.

I know what it took to drag joy back into a life that had nearly forgotten how to hold it. I know the sound of my own name spoken with reverence instead of shame. I know the difference between being broken and being remade.

And most importantly-

I know this:

I am still here.

Still mine.

Still becoming.

Makitia Thompson
Founder of Minds In Design

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