The Moment I Chose to Thrive Over Survive

A story about a desk, a removed door, and the moment everything changed

I stayed.
I stayed longer than any self-respecting person would have.
About 25 years too long.

I stopped saying anything remotely adjacent to “I love you” a year earlier. I stayed to keep up a facade of a relationship. To keep the peace.

Over the years I could see the signs of when a cycle would be starting. Mini-cycles would happen nearly monthly. I’d blame it on the full moon, to be lighthearted about it. To make excuses for his behaviors. But the full cycles, those…those…would happen about once a year and last for months. At the end of each cycle I felt less human, more drained, and the bar of what counted as acceptable, as normal, was lowered.

I’d escape into my job, into school…whatever he felt would make me a better, more educated, gloat-worthy, money-making person. Because if I had those things, he’d give me a little breathing room at home. Most of the time.

When I started standing up for myself is when things hit their worst. The only place I had left to myself was a desk in the corner of the bedroom because the entire rest of the house was filled with his projects, his stuff, pure chaos, and my desk was the only thing I had physical control over. But even then, there was no escape. During one heated exchange I had closed the door to the room because I needed space, I needed a moment. By the next day all the doors in the house were removed. ALL of them. I needed to be accessible to him when he wanted, even if I was in the bathroom.

This was my low point.

It was while sitting at my desk, half-present through another endless diatribe about my inadequacies, that the cord of attachment to the life I was living was cut. It hit like a bolt of lightning. A full-body knowing that I could start a new chapter and not miss anything about this one. That everything I had loved about what was around me: the house, the dogs, the city I lived in. I could build again. That the willpower, the resilience, the strength, the knowledge, the ability — they all lived inside me, and that was mine. They were always going to be mine. And that they, more than any physical surrounding or belonging, would go with me anywhere, always.

That was the start of my transformation. The start of my own Sovereign Return. One step at a time, starting with a single revelation: I am deserving. I owe no one my identity, my self-respect, my self-worth. I am worthy. I am capable. I am resourced. I am fucking amazing.

I did a lot on my own at first. I read books. I numbed myself. I was messy for a year and a half. But even in that mess, I was finding my way. I went to therapy. I found a coach who helped me understand how to tap into my body’s wisdom, to identify core values and beliefs. I found companionship with people who were on their own journeys of self, and we celebrated our wins together.

Yes, there are times when I reflect back and think I would have done things differently. “If only I knew then what I know now.” But what this perspective gives me is gratitude and honor for that version of me, the survivor who became a thriver. I never wish I could go back in time to make different choices or decisions. I wouldn’t be here at this moment: with my amazing husband, in a place that feels like home, in a city I never expected to be in, living a life that is wholly, fully, me. I am an active participant in my own life, and that is everything. Who I was then allowed me to be who I am now, and I love him for it.

I share this not because I think my story is yours. It may look nothing like yours. Your desk may be a car in a parking lot where you finally let yourself cry. A hotel room you booked because you needed one night of silence. A therapist’s office. A journal page at 2am. The specific geography doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is a moment, for some of us dramatic and for others quiet, where we recognize that what we have been waiting for permission to be has been inside us the entire time. That no circumstance, no relationship, no amount of losing ourselves changes what is fundamentally ours.

That is the way. The patterns I now help others name and work through, the ones that look like loyalty, like endurance, like keeping the peace, I know them from the inside. I lived them for decades. That is the transformation that takes place when we decide it is time to return to what has always been within us.

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Where is your desk? Not the furniture. The moment. The place where you finally stopped negotiating with the life you were living and recognized that everything you needed had always been inside you. If you haven’t found it yet, you don’t need permission to begin looking.

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I’d love to hear what this brought up for you.

Your reflections are part of the medicine, and every voice adds to the remembering of our collective sovereignty.

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