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For years, I thought survival was strength.
I wore it like a crown: the long nights endured, the heartbreaks swallowed, the betrayals I carried silently.
People said, “You’re so strong.” What they didn’t see was that my strength was really endurance—an armor I had learned to wear so well that even I forgot how heavy it was.
Survival taught me how to hold my breath, how to keep going when every cell in my body wanted to stop.
But survival is not the same as living. Survival is treading water.
Sovereignty is learning to swim toward shore.
The Survivor Stage
In survival, I was reactive. I bent myself to fit others’ needs, avoided conflict at all costs, and confused love with sacrifice. My voice went quiet because I believed silence would keep me safe.
But there is a difference between being safe and being silenced.
In survival mode, I mistook numbness for peace. I accepted scraps of affection and called it love. I thought resilience meant staying, no matter how much it hurt.
The truth is: survival is about minimizing harm. Sovereignty is about choosing joy.
The Shift
The turning point was not loud. It wasn’t a lightning strike or a dramatic breaking free. It was quiet.
It was in the moment I realized: I am tired of being tired.
Healing didn’t arrive as a miracle—it arrived as a series of small, stubborn choices. Choosing to tell the truth when it would have been easier to stay silent. Choosing to say no when I had been conditioned to always say yes. Choosing to walk away from people who only loved me when I was small enough to control.
These choices felt vicious at first. They were messy, uncomfortable, sometimes even painful. But they were mine.
The Sovereign Stage
Sovereignty is not about perfection—it’s about permission. Permission to feel. Permission to speak. Permission to take up space without apology.
In sovereignty, I learned that my softness is not weakness, my boundaries are not walls, and my empathy is not a liability. I learned that the throne of my own life does not need to be earned through suffering—it belongs to me simply because I exist.
Sovereignty is not about ruling others; it’s about ruling yourself. It’s the quiet, steady power of self-trust. It’s the decision to stop surviving and start living.
When I stepped into sovereignty, I didn’t just heal—I transformed. I began to see love differently. Not as something I had to chase or prove myself worthy of, but as something I could cultivate from within and allow to flow outward.
Sovereignty is not the absence of struggle. Life still brings loss, grief, and challenge. The difference is: I no longer hand my crown to the storm.
I sit with the discomfort. I write my way through the silence. I allow myself to be both velvet and venom—soft when softness heals, fierce when fierceness protects.
The Remembrance
If you are reading this and find yourself in survival mode, know this: there is no shame in surviving. Survival is what kept you here. Survival is sacred. But it does not have to be your forever home.
There will come a day when survival is not enough—when your spirit will long for more. And that is where sovereignty begins.
It begins in the whisper: I deserve better.
It begins in the choice: I will not abandon myself again.
It begins when you decide to reclaim the throne of your own life.
Because sovereignty isn’t something someone else can give you. It’s something you rise up and claim for yourself.
And when you do, you will realize—you were never just a survivor. You were always a sovereign soul, waiting to be remembered.
~
author: Shara Ally
Image: Author's own
Editor: Nicole Cameron
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