About three months ago, I reached a turning point that marked the end of a thirty-year chapter of my life. I consciously exited survival mode. The shift had been building quietly for months. When it finally surfaced, it was undeniable. I knew I could not keep easing into change. Something in me understood it was time.

A career incident brought everything into sharper focus. It revealed the exact places where I was still overextending myself. Not chaos. Not crisis. But overcompensating. Expanding beyond scope. Starting from a healthy place and slowly becoming drained as the demands increased over time. That moment did not start the process. It intensified it.

During a lot of my internal reflections, I started to put the puzzle pieces together. Survival mode goes deeper than people think. It is not just about money or instability. It is what happens when you are repeatedly placed in unsafe circumstances and your system adapts to survive them. Over time, you develop a general distrust of people and the world around you. You learn coping mechanisms in those seasons that follow you into adulthood and disguise themselves as strengths or virtues. Hyper-independence looks like resilience. Over-functioning looks like capability. Emotional self-sufficiency looks like maturity. But underneath it, your system is still bracing.

Western civilization has normalized survival mode as what life is supposed to feel like. Constant stress. Constant output. Constant striving. And part of that normalization comes from the fact that so many people around you are also living in survival mode. Everyone has different triggers and different expressions of it, but when something is done by the masses, it becomes normalized. When everyone is bracing, overworking, postponing peace, it stops looking like survival. It just looks like life.

You become the fixer, the regulator, the one who can handle it, the one who absorbs more than you should. You normalize stress. You normalize imbalance. You normalize being slightly uncomfortable but telling yourself it is fine.

When I stepped back after the career incident, I started to see the pattern everywhere.

In work, I had lowballed myself at different points in my life. I had accepted pay and positioning that did not reflect my value. I justified it. They are going through a hard time. It will grow. I can make it work.

Across all relationships, friendships, romantic, and family, there was imbalance. I was showing up healthy. Communicating. Initiating. Investing. Traveling. Checking in. Maintaining connection. But over time I could see that what started as mutual often shifted into me carrying more. Emotional imbalance. Lack of reciprocity. Subtle disrespect. Excuses that I translated into understanding instead of accountability. I was not confused about how to love. I was accepting situations where that love was not being matched.

When I really looked at it, what shocked me the most was not what other people did. It was what I had normalized.

That is one of the quietest symptoms of survival mode, and nobody really breaks it down like this. Over time, without even realizing it, you start accepting less and stretching yourself thinner. Not in a dramatic way. In small, everyday ways that feel reasonable in the moment.

It looks like being understanding when you are actually dismissing your own needs. It looks like being selfless when you are slowly putting yourself on the side. It looks like telling yourself you can handle it, you will fix it, it is temporary, you do not want to inconvenience anyone. And because you can survive it, you convince yourself it is fine.

But survival mode does not just make you endure hard things. It trains you to normalize imbalance. It trains you to make room for what drains you, because peace starts to feel conditional. Like something you earn later. Like something waiting on the other side of a milestone. I will rest when this stabilizes. I will relax when I reach that. I will be happy when this finally works out. Peace becomes something postponed instead of something you are allowed to live inside now.

For me, it did not feel like shrinking. It felt like being capable and stretched too thin. I have always been strong. I have always known my value. But as an intuitive, I carry an energy that attracts people who need things. Guidance. Stability. Answers. Direction. And I can give it. That was never the issue.

The issue was overgiving.

From my mid-twenties into my early thirties, my life was not stable. Money fluctuated. Circumstances were unpredictable. I worked hard for everything. So when I finally began building stability, I became protective of it. I prioritized keeping things smooth. Keeping the peace. Keeping everything functioning. And because I am capable, I would step in and fix, correct, guide, help. Especially intuitively. People leaned on me. Some became overly dependent on my insight. And instead of setting limits, I absorbed it.

That is how survival mode showed up for me. Not believing I deserved less. But overextending myself to maintain stability. Overhelping. Overgiving. Keeping everything steady, even when it meant I was the one being stretched.

I had already been working on the remaining pieces of survival mode in me for months. I was aware. I was adjusting. But something shifted from gradual change to intentional enforcement. It was no longer enough to understand the pattern. My behavior had to fully align with what I was seeing. So I raised my prices. I formalized scope instead of quietly overdelivering. I stopped saying yes automatically. I stopped responding immediately to everything. I let silence sit. I let people show up or not show up without me compensating for it. If I reach out and someone does not reciprocate, I leave it there, because a relationship takes two people and I am no longer carrying both sides.

More than anything, what changed internally was clarity and intention. I already had inner peace. That peace has simply deepened. I have always loved myself deeply. What shifted was how consistently I practiced that love. There were moments where I was choosing selflessness at the expense of myself. I was putting other people’s needs ahead of my own in ways that slowly drained me.

I have always known that I love myself first. The difference now is that I act like it. I no longer sacrifice myself in the name of being understanding, capable, or strong. Loving myself first is not new. Practicing it at the highest level is.

I am still allowing my nervous system to recalibrate to safety, security, and stability. For most of my life, my system was bracing. Now it is learning something different. It is relearning that calm is safe. That quiet is safe. That I do not have to always stabilize everything around me. That I do not have to earn rest. That I do not have to prove my value through constant output.

For the first time in my life, I am not looking for the other shoe to drop. For the first time in my life, I am able to fully exhale. I am able to feel at rest. I am not walking around feeling like I always have to be doing something.

Accepting less did not come from low self-worth. It came from survival. It came from trying to maintain stability in unstable seasons. It came from being capable enough to carry more than I should have.

Now that I am no longer in survival mode, I am free. I am living.

xo Jessica