Survival

Survival is actually about being kind enough to yourself so you actually want to be alive.

I don't think I fully knew this in my 20s yet. Then survival was more about pleasing family or girlfriends or friends or relatives. It was never really about just pleasing myself enough so I actually wanted to be alive.

So, from about age 21 to 24 I didn't want to be alive at all unless I was walking along the beach, or hiking in the mountains or skiing or backpacking with friends.

But, most of the time I would have preferred just being dead.

However, I couldn't do that to my parents. They had been very good parents and had been good to me growing up and I had to honor them. And by honoring them by staying alive when I most wanted to be dead eventually got me to the place where I started honoring myself and what I really needed too.

The first thing I needed was to separate myself from my childhood religion. However, doing that was one of the causes of me becoming suicidal for several years. The next thing I needed to do was to separate from my girlfriend from that religion. At the time this wouldn't have made any sense to me at all. However, when she told me she wanted to be in a celibate marriage with me without any children I had no trouble realizing this potential marriage was never going to work for me.

So, this choice that I was strong enough to make to break up with someone who I was very much in love with before we both destroyed our lives and came to hate each other (like many marriages do), and instead face being suicidal for several years was very brave of me and at the time a suicidal thing for me to do.

However, I figured being in a miserable marriage without physical intimacy or children, I realized death for me was a better choice than that one.

So, without realizing it I chose life over my slow death at that point.

I always have been very good about making good decisions.

However, emotionally surviving those good decisions is another thing entirely.

I had no idea who I was becoming yet likely until I got close to 30 or so. Then I began to understand who I was better. By age 30 I was a single father to a 4 year old son and I had married for the first time at age 26.

But, becoming a father was one of the best things that ever happened to me because I was caring about someone else and I could easily rise above my personal wants and needs to care for my son and luckily my parents at first helped me in this until I married eventually for the 2nd time.

So, surviving my 20s was very very hard until my son was born at age 26. Then somehow it wasn't hard at all staying alive and starting businesses to support myself and my son.

But, getting to that point (age 25) was almost impossible for me in trying to stay alive to see who I was going to become by age 30 as a single father and a business owner at that point in my life.

So, in the end survival is really about being kind enough to yourself so you actually will want to choose to be alive at all.