Survivor Is Not Our Final Name
Survivor.
A person who survives.
It’s a word we often use — for ourselves, for others who’ve endured violence.
But what does it really mean?
Does it say anything more than: I’m still here?
That we’ve lived through something that could so easily have taken our lives?
The term survivor was born as a counter to victim.
It offered a way to reclaim our humanity, to loosen the grip of shame.
And that shift mattered.
It still does.
But perhaps now is also the time to pause and remember a few things:
We are allowed to name ourselves victims if that is what feels true. No title needs to be earned.
When survivor becomes the whole of our identity, it can quietly hold us back from healing.
We are so much more than any single experience — even one that fractured us.
And yet, when something has hurt so deeply, we often shut the door on it completely.
That’s part of the pain too: the disconnection. Facing it asks everything of us.
But we do it not to wear the identity of survivor like a badge — we do it to reclaim our wholeness.
There is no returning to the before. Trauma alters the path.
But healing allows us to carry it differently — to place it in the past, alongside all the other stories that have shaped us but no longer define us.
In the rawness of trauma, everything else can fade. The pain takes centre stage, and for a time, it feels like all we are.
But that intensity isn't meant to last forever. We are meant for more than surviving.
We are meant to live.
To love.
To feel joy again.
What if, instead of I am a survivor, we said simply:
I was raped.
I was beaten.
I was hurt.
The survival is already in those words — it’s in the was.
Do we lose anything by telling the truth plainly?
I long for a world where the reality of sexual violence is not silenced — and where one day, our daughters, granddaughters, and their children can look back at it as something unthinkable from a past they never had to live.
This is a collective hope.
A collective struggle.
But within that, there is the quiet, sacred work each of us must do alone.
To be able to say:
What happened to me was horrific. But I’ve taken back my life.
And not just say it — feel it.
Because what happened to us is not who we are.
It never was.
And healing?
Healing exists so that we can do what survivors — by definition — are meant to do:
Live.
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