Over the weeks that followed, pain and fatigue spread throughout her body, and neither she nor her doctor had any idea why. Then, in the summer of 2019, she had the surreal and agonising experience of seeing her fingers swelling up it felt as if they were breaking. The reason survival mode is so dangerous is that we can get so used to it that we simply accept our misery She had built a fulfilling independent life for herself and she loved it. Maybe to a lot of people, finding the right products for the right buildings sounds boring, but I found it really exciting and I spent my time driving around, chatting on the phone to customers who became my friends, listening to my music.” The rest of her time would be spent Thai boxing or running, volunteering at a local homeless shelter, going out with friends or relaxing at home with her three cats. But I wanted to speak to her in particular because she doesn’t just know what it means to be in survival mode she also found a way out of it.īefore the pandemic, Marchbank worked as a sales rep in construction. Marchbank knows what she is talking about when it comes to that kind of existence. She studied history at university, and what she associates with survival mode, she told me over Zoom, is “winter before the Industrial Revolution, because that is literally getting from one day to the next and not dying, isn’t it? These days, emotionally, we’ve managed to get there without the harsh winters, somehow.” Perhaps what many of us are experiencing at the moment is a kind of internal harsh winter: a frost that creeps into the mind and the body, freezing green shoots and hope, stunting growth. When I asked reader Nicky Marchbank, 40, from Kent, what images this phrase brought to mind, I found her answer striking. All this is what you, our readers, wrote about when we invited you to tell us what living in survival mode means to you. Others feel despairing and hopeless, reading endless catastrophic headlines about the climate emergency, the war in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis. These are people who have found themselves choosing between heating and eating, or who are stuck on a waiting list for vital healthcare, or who have caring responsibilities that leave them drained of energy for themselves. But the change in the seasons may bring little relief to those whom this longest and bleakest of winters has tipped into “survival mode”. My heart lifted: new life spring springing winter ending. W alking into the NHS clinic where I work as a psychotherapist, I saw that the daffodils by the path had finally flowered.
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