Strength vs Survival: The Story Behind My Tattoo

I used to believe I was strong.

I had survived the lows, and oh, my words how I relished the highs of this journey called life.

I can still remember thinking:

I can do anything.

I don’t need anyone.

I am strong.

I am a survivor.

I even had “stay strong” tattooed on my wrist, as if carving it into my skin would make it permanent, unshakable, untouchable.

Back then, I wore strength like a badge of honour. People even praised me for it: “You’re so strong, you’ve been through so much, and look at you still standing.” I believed it. I lived it. I thought I thrived on it. Like a drug I was addicted to the indescribable feeling of strength and numbness.

But over time, that tattoo started to feel heavy, almost outdated. Because what I have learned through my own healing, through my body, and through the work I now share with others, is this:

👉 Strength and survival are not the same.

Survival Mode: The Body at War.

Here is the truth many of us do not even realise:

What we often call “strength” is actually survival mode.

Survival mode is clever. It keeps us alive when we are in danger. It is the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response doing its job. But when the nervous system gets stuck there, the body begins to live as if life itself is a battlefield.

That battlefield looks like this:

Muscles constantly tense, as if waiting for impact.

A mind that doesn’t rest, always scanning for what could go wrong.

Breath caught high in the chest, never reaching the belly.

Digestion slowed down because safety doesn’t feel guaranteed.

Hormones dysregulated, sleep disturbed, immunity lowered.

Survival is the body waging its own war, day after day. And while people on the outside might clap and say “you’re so strong”, on the inside the cost is immense.

Survival and Attachment, Survival mode does not only live in the body, it shapes how we connect. Our attachment patterns, formed in childhood, often intertwine with survival states.

Anxious attachment, keeps us hyper vigilant to abandonment. We over give, people-please, or cling, because the nervous system has learned safety comes from never being left.

Avoidant attachment, numbs and distances. The body has decided it is safer not to need, not to rely, not to trust, so intimacy feels like a threat.

Disorganised attachment, is the tug of war between both: wanting closeness but fearing it, pushing and pulling in cycles of confusion.

In all of these, survival is steering. It tells us: you’re safe only if you adapt, perform, hold it together.

But real strength? Real strength is different.

True Strength: Safety, Softness, Support

Healing taught me something that once would have sounded weak to me:

True strength is not about staying strong at all costs.

It is not about white-knuckling life alone.

True strength is about:

Safety in the body, not hypervigilance.

Softness as a choice, not a weakness.

Support as medicine, not dependency.

Resting, trusting, and knowing you don’t have to do it all alone.

Strength is not just about surviving the storm, it also is about learning to dance again once the skies clear.

The Song That Helped Me See

There is a song that always seems to find me when I forget this lesson, like a proper old school if I can even call it that, "Gloria"

It’s a song that holds both defiance and longing, a reminder of the parts of us that are calling out to be truly seen, truly loved, not just held up as “strong survivors.”

Whenever I hear it, it stirs something deep inside me, a memory of the girl who believed survival was her superpower, and the woman now learning that strength is actually the soft ground of safety beneath her feet.

The Tattoo and the Reminder, When I look at the tattoo on my wrist now, it is no longer a badge of honour.

Instead it is a gentle reminder.

A reminder of where I have been, many interludes of meetings of nights with the dark soul sit behind those words,all the years I hid suppressing the thoughts and truly believing that I had to be unbreakable.

And a reminder of where I am now, choosing a deeper, kinder, more organic and honest kind of strength.

The kind that does not need to prove itself.

The kind that allows space for tears, rest, and connection.

The kind that lets the body exhale, soften, and trust again.

If you have been called “strong,” maybe you will recognise yourself in these words. Maybe you have mistaken survival for strength too.

Maybe it is time for you to dive into where that belief came from maybe it's time for you to breathe and find Soulstar.

And if you have been called strong or feeling you are living u see the weight of that super power know this: there is another way.

Your body doesn’t need to wage war forever.

Your nervous system doesn’t need to stay locked in survival.

Strength can be soft. It can be supported. It can be safe.

Because you are not just a survivor. You are so much more.

And perhaps, like me, you will one day look back at your old tattoos, your old stories, your old survival strategies, and smile knowing they got you here. But they do not define where you’re going.