I Stopped Surviving and I Started Fighting

I am hesitant to share this because I feel like I will get a lot of judgement or backlash but there is a good story with this. So I got a new tattoo today. You can see it below, it says I stopped surviving and I started fighting. There’s a lot of meaning behind it.

So back in the end of march, beginning of April I was really struggling but one day I was on Tiktok and someone jumped out at me. Her name was Jazz Thornton and she was talking about how she turned thousands of pages of psych notes into a book. Now if you are someone who struggles immensely with mental health, this might very much intrigue you. Her book was call Stop Surviving, Start Fighting.

This book is incredible. I was out of a job at this time due to covid so I could spend as much time reading as I wanted to so I spent hours reading her book over a couple of days. And y’all it is so so good. I highly recommend it but trigger warning she does talk about suicide.

This book has a lot of good in it. While our stories are not exactly the same, there’s a lot of similarities within our stories. I was bale to relate to her. Her book talks about how she realized she wasn’t fighting her mental health, she was just surviving after a conversation with someone close to her. She decided she wanted to fight.

In March/April I’m gonna be honest, I felt kinda hopeless. I never really fully recovered from the bout in January that landed me inpatient. I was still really struggling and was really scared to admit it. Her book talks about a lot of good but that’s when I kinda came to the same conclusion as her. I wasn’t fighting at that point. I was merely surviving and not doing a very good job at it. I needed to fight. Once I decided to fight, its like a whole new door opened up in my life.

My life didn’t get easier but the load seemed to have lessen. I was feeling happy. When I decided to fight, my whole life changed.

I kinda fell down the rabbit hole again. I’m no where near where I was in January or March and April but now I’m also not where I was in May and June. Stuff happened in my life, like breaking up with my now ex fiancé, repressed memories coming up, and stress, that I haven’t chosen to fight. I’ve chosen to just survive. I gave control to God when I broke up with Drew and then I took control back a few weeks later by doing maladaptive coping skills.

The last time I was doing these maladaptive coping skills, I was barely surviving let alone fighting. Fighting things like this is really hard I’m not gonna lie. The way your brain gets wired around doing these makes it feel like that’s how you have to live and you are going to be doing things like that for the rest of your life.

Now you get to choose in that moment. You can choose to try and keep control and keep merely surviving in a way that you know to be harmful for you. Or you can choose to give control back to God and truly fight. That is where I’m at currently. I am at that choice. Im disgusted with dealing with this coping skill. Im over dealing with it. It’s not something I can get over by myself. So I took the steps and am getting the help I need in that aspect. I have been praying and giving the control back to God. That is something that I have to do daily. I have to daily surrender control to God.

But I decided that it was time I stopped surviving and I started fighting. And now I have a reminder that I am not going to just survive in this life. I am going to fight. I am going to fight the stigmas. I am going to fight the mental health. I am going to fight to be happy. I am going to fight for my God. I am going to fight.

Now I know what some of you are going to be frustrated or not happy that I got a new tattoo. I know people have told me that women with a lot of tattoos is not attractive or that I shouldn’t get anymore. My mom told me after my 3rd that she didn’t want me to get all tatted up. I get it. I honestly do. I’m 20 years old. God giving I have a while on this earth. I shouldn’t get so many tattoos while being so young.

I get it. But I need to do what will help my older self and my now self. So if that means covering my arm in tattoos as reminders I am strong enough to win my fight with mental illness, than that means covering my arm. My older self, I'm quite sure, would be happier with tattoos covering her arm than self harm scars. I would rather have good reminders of where I’ve been and how far I’ve come then reminders that make me really upset and feel shame or guilt.

I hope you all are having a good day and week!

Hold onto hope and stay strong.

Madison Rae <3