Survival is Not a Solo Act

There is a myth we are taught about survival—that the strongest people are the ones who do it alone. That resilience is private. That making it through something difficult is a solitary achievement, earned through grit, silence, and endurance. I believed that myth for a long time. I wanted to be the kind of person who could carry everything by myself, who needed no one, who survived quietly.

But that has never been true.

My survival has always been tangled with other people. Even in the moments when I felt most alone, when systems failed me spectacularly, when institutions harmed instead of helped, there were still threads of care holding me together. I didn’t always recognize them at the time. Sometimes they were small, almost invisible. Sometimes they arrived when I least expected them.

A text message that came at exactly the right moment. A meal left on my doorstep. Someone offering a ride when I couldn’t get myself there. Someone staying—physically or emotionally—when leaving would have been easier. These weren’t grand gestures. They didn’t fix everything. But they mattered. They kept me here.

As a disabled person, I’ve learned that survival is inherently relational. Disability justice teaches us that no one is independent in the way we’re told to admire. We rely on each other—on access, on accommodations, on care networks that make daily life possible. The fantasy of total self-sufficiency collapses quickly when your body or mind refuses to cooperate with the pace and expectations of the world around you. Needing help isn’t a personal failure; it’s a reality of being human in an ableist society that pretends otherwise.

Queer and trans survival has always been rooted in community, too. Long before we had language like “mutual aid” or “community care,” we were finding each other in the margins, building chosen families, sharing resources, offering protection and belonging where none was guaranteed. Our histories are full of collective survival—people pooling what little they had, people showing up for one another when the state refused to, people refusing to disappear quietly.

And still, needing people is complicated.

I hold fear alongside my longing for connection. I’ve been disappointed. I’ve been harmed. I’ve been let down by people I trusted, by communities that promised safety and failed to provide it. Survival with others means living inside that tension: wanting closeness while bracing for loss, craving support while guarding your heart. It means acknowledging that community is not perfect or pure. People are messy. People are flawed. People sometimes fall short in ways that hurt deeply.

But even knowing all of that, I don’t believe survival is meant to be done alone.

What I’m learning—slowly, imperfectly—is how to let myself be held without demanding perfection. How to accept care without turning it into a debt. How to recognize that collective survival doesn’t mean everyone always gets it right; it means we keep trying anyway. It means we repair when we can. It means we stay in conversation. It means we understand that care is a practice, not a personality trait.

There were times I thought surviving meant becoming harder, more self-contained, less reliant on anyone else. Now I understand that survival has often looked like softness shared. Like someone sitting with me in the quiet. Like being reminded that I don’t have to explain everything to deserve care. Like learning that interdependence is not weakness—it’s wisdom passed down through generations who knew that no one makes it out alone.

Survival is personal, yes. My story is my own. My body carries its own history. My healing moves at its own pace. But my survival has also been profoundly communal. It has been shaped by people who showed up briefly and people who stayed. By care offered without fanfare. By moments of connection that interrupted despair just long enough to keep me going.

I didn’t make it here alone.

That truth doesn’t diminish my strength—it contextualizes it. It reminds me that surviving is not about proving how much you can endure by yourself, but about recognizing the networks of care, resistance, and love that make endurance possible in the first place. In a world that glorifies isolation and productivity over connection, choosing to survive together is a radical act.

And maybe that’s the most honest version of survival I know: not a solo act, but a shared one, carried forward by many hands, even when we’re afraid to reach for them.

Journaling Prompts: Surviving Together

If this piece stirred something in you, you might sit with one or two of these prompts—slowly, without pressure to resolve anything neatly.

• Who has helped me survive in ways I didn’t fully recognize at the time?
  

• What kinds of care feel safest or most nourishing for me right now?
  

• Where do I struggle with needing others, and what fears live there?
  

• What does interdependence mean to me, beyond the idea of “asking for help”?
  

• How have I offered care to others as a form of survival or resistance?
  

• What would it look like to let myself be held—just a little more—without guilt or apology?
  
  

Take what resonates. Leave the rest.

With softness and solidarity,

Ezra