A Glimpse Into My Brain

Survival Mode

TW: brief non-descriptive mentions of trauma

Survival mode is when your body goes on auto-pilot
Needing to stay alive
Needing to stay sane
Trying to stay safe
Even though your life is falling apart

Survival mode is when you know what's happening
And you're worried
But your mind prevents it from sinking in
So it sits there
Trying to break this fortress

Survival mode is a coping mechanism for many things
From wars, and plane crashes
To parents with cancer, and stopping a friendship

But what happens when you have two survival modes
When something is already happening
Then something else happens

Your mind isn't strong enough to keep both out at once
So it creates another shield
But it traps the first one down in the process

Coming out of survival mode is hard
It can be days, weeks, months, maybe even years after the incident
When you finally realize the extent of what happened
But that's only one survival mode

What happens when the first one starts to crack
The one that's been there for as long as you can remember
The one that's kept you alive for 13 years
When that happens you finally realize that what happened was bad

It's hard
Harder than the second one dissolving
Because for as long as you can remember that's how you've lived
Day in, day out in survival mode

So when it starts to crack you try to fix it
Telling yourself what happened wasn't bad
Everyone goes through it
But then the memories come back

Vivid pictures of stuff you know happened
Then stuff you wish you could forget again
Screaming, smashing, shaking, crying
Memories you shouldn't even have

And that's makes it harder to convince yourself it wasn't that bad
Survival mode will make you tone down your own experiences
I still don't know if that's good or not

I've lived in survival mode for so long
I don't remember a time without it
I know one's already gone
And one's cracking
I really don't want to find out what living with no survival mode is like
For some people it must be nice
But for me
For me it would be hell

(17/4/20)