Born Into Survival

The first addiction was my thumb. My first lie was that I was okay.

I’ve been in survival mode since the day I was born.

Not because I chose it.

Because I was born into it.

My mother had severe postpartum depression. She wasn’t nurturing. She wasn’t connected. She’s since told me how she’d call the doctor to ask how to make me stop crying — as if I were a malfunctioning machine, not a baby desperate to be held.

Picking me up?

Wasn’t her instinct.

Holding me?

Didn’t happen.

So I found comfort the only way I could — by putting my thumb in my mouth.

And just like that, I became addicted to self-soothing before I even knew what the word soothe meant.

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For over a decade, I sucked my thumb every time I felt bored, lonely, or overwhelmed.

My thumb was my home.

My only coping tool.

The only thing that made me feel okay.

They tried everything to make me stop.

Toys. Threats. Goo that burned.

It didn’t work. Because what I needed was never punishment — it was safety. What I needed was never discipline — it was connection.

They put a mandibular rake in my mouth.

Sharp metal on the roof of my mouth that made sucking impossible.

The night they installed it, I cried myself to sleep.

I was 13 years old and no one gave me another tool.

They took my comfort away and gave me nothing in its place.

That’s the beginning of the story. But it’s not even close to the end.

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I was born in Aspen. Then ripped away.

Moved to Rhode Island after my parents divorced.

Moved again. And again.

Every school, every bedroom, every babysitter — another version of me formed.

And I didn’t know I was autistic.

I didn’t know why the world felt so loud, so sharp, so exhausting.

I didn’t have the tools to regulate my emotions.

So I obsessed.

I begged God to keep my mom alive every time she left the house.

I stared out the window like my life depended on it — because it felt like it did.

When we moved to San Diego when I was nine, it didn’t get better.

When we moved again to live with her boyfriend — again, it didn’t get better.

And by then I had zero coping skills. Zero friends I trusted. Zero sense of self.

So I lied.

White lies.

To try to fit in. To be liked. To survive.

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By high school, I was already exhausted.

I got my license and I rebelled.

Snuck out.

Smoked weed.

Drank.

Had sex with boys who didn’t love me.

Because I was still chasing something I never got as a baby.

Connection. Safety. Affection.

And even though I knew logically what I was doing, it didn’t matter.

Knowing is not the same as healing.

Knowing is not enough when your nervous system has been trained to settle for scraps.

I stayed with boys who triggered every alarm in my body.

I ignored the screams of my intuition.

And I got pregnant at 19.

And that… is when the real self-hatred began.

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I don’t regret my daughter.

I regret how unsafe I was when I became her mother.

She was switched in the hospital after birth.

I found out.

I brought her back.

But that hour nearly broke me. And I had no support. No therapy. No help.

Her father stayed in our lives for 17 years (not together) — but he was emotionally/mentally abusive.

And I couldn’t handle it.

I couldn’t keep a job.

I fell into another relationship, [another kind of] worse than the first.

And before long, I was a single mother of three.

Juggling schedules that weren’t made for me.

Paying bills I couldn’t afford.

Power shutoffs. Car impounds. Debt. Hunger. Rage. Desperation.

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And then I met a man. Younger.

He became my thumb.

Another addiction.

Another way to cope with being alone.

We were together off and on for 10 years.

And even though my higher self kept whispering, this isn’t it, I stayed.

I was in the hospital 19 times over two years with chronic back pain that no one could explain.

Morphine didn’t help.

Only fentanyl did — and that came with side-eyes and suspicion from nurses.

But it wasn’t a drug issue.

It was a nervous system issue.

My body was screaming what I refused to face:

I was living out of alignment (a lie).

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When the pain didn’t stop, I drank.

Because drinking brought joy.

It turned the volume down on the pain.

It made me feel something besides despair.

And then in 2018, I started a corporate job.

For the first time, I had stability.

But my life wasn’t set up to support it.

Sexual harassment at work pushed me to the edge.

The pandemic tipped me over it.

I left the job.

We moved again.

We bought a fixer-upper in a small, quiet town.

And I was left alone.

With myself.

And that’s when the real work began.

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Let me be clear:

Solitude does not mean peace.

At first, solitude feels like hell.

Because when you take away the noise, all that’s left is your unhealed self.

The regrets.

The mistakes.

The shame of dragging your kids through relationships they never asked for.

The guilt of screaming when you meant to stay calm.

The quiet terror of realizing you were never given the tools to do any of this.

But I stayed.

And I sat with it.

And I stopped drinking.

Stopped vaping.

Stopped running.

And I learned.

How to breathe.

How to sit with the discomfort.

How to build rituals that ground me.

How to listen to my body.

How to speak to myself with something resembling kindness.

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I am not a success story.

I am a survivor story.

I am still learning how to mother myself.

Still waking up in a body that feels like it’s been through war.

Still rebuilding trust in my voice.

Still repairing the relationship with the children I love more than anything.

But I am no longer abandoning myself.

And that is the beginning of every breakthrough.

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If you’re in the thick of it, please hear this:

You are not broken.

You are not hopeless.

You are not alone.

You’re just rewiring a lifetime of survival.

One breath at a time.

One hard conversation at a time.

One self-forgiveness at a time.

This is the work.

And I’m doing it with you.

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Healing was the first chapter. Thriving is the rest of the story.

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