When I Stopped Fighting for Us, I Started Fighting for Me
By: Crystal Jackson
Tags: Relationships, Self, Empowerment, Resilience, Mental Health

When I Stopped Fighting for Us, I Started Fighting for Me

Photo by Marcelo Matarazzo on Unsplash

There is a fight in me that just won’t quit. I’ve used it. It has been the fire and the grit that powered me through a difficult childhood, out of a dismal marriage, and into life as a single self-employed mother of two.

I never stop fighting.

Even points of surrender have only ever helped me change direction. I think about that sometimes — about the moment when the fight in me, for just a moment, left. I remember the precise moment it happened in my marriage.

One moment, I was fighting tooth and nail to preserve my relationship. But with a handful of words tossed like rocks in my face, everything shifted. I felt this curious letting go — this strange mixture of falling and opening simultaneously. The cruelty hurt, but it made me brave. It set me free. What the hell was I even fighting for?

For a brief and beautiful moment, all the fight went out of me.

But it came right back with stunning ferocity. I took a deep breath, and I started fighting for myself.

I took the dogged persistence I had used making a dead marriage look like a living one, and I used it to change my life. I was determined to live a life I could love. Even if I didn’t know how I was going to manage it, I knew I absolutely had to find a way. I wasn’t fighting for something already dead and gone — I was fighting for my own survival.

I still feel like I walk the world only a moment away from a metaphorical punch thrown, striding through life with guns blazing. I am an alley cat in a woman’s body, trusting no one and nothing more than myself. The fire has kept me warm through lonely nights and burned down situations that no longer served me.

But if I’m going to be bleeding, let it be because I’ve clung to grit and hope and an unwavering belief in myself. Let me bleed because I pulled myself out of every dark time by fingertips and ragged nails.

If I’m going to be broken, let it be because I climbed to the greatest heights I could manage, even if it meant falling back down only to start again.

If I’m going to be alone, let me take wildness as my companion and warm my hands over the flames of every burned out bridge that I once called lover or friend or trusted-person-trusted-no-more.

I am a street brawler in the body of a writer, bleeding ink and pain all over once-blank, now-crowded pages. If I have to fight, let it be for myself first.

I have fought for jobs and the security they promised. I fought for higher education, the first in my family to make it. I fought for friends to stay who were only ever going to leave. I fought for relationships where no one was ever going to fight for me. I fought for an idea of family that would never happen for me. And I fought for my children — for their very existence, for their health.

Now I’m fighting for me.

Because that is what life is about — not the endless waging of war against others or the accumulation of possession or the meaningless mile markers of perceived success. It is only ever about figuring out who we are and loving that person enough to fight to make sure that we have the space to live and love and breathe freely on this earth.

It’s fighting against everyone else’s idea of us until all that is left is our pure, authentic being — imperfectly perfect.

We were never meant to live out someone else’s idea of us, someone else’s plan for our lives. We were only ever meant to wake up one day and realize that this life is short, and it is our own. Our birth and eventual death are experiences we traverse alone, and no one else’s approval will make that any easier to bear.

If we’re lucky, we fill the middle part with joy, love, and honesty. We live our purpose and no one else’s. We fight for ourselves.

But if I’m going to surrender, let it to be love given so freely that I never feel backed into a corner or pushed out into the cold.

If I’m going to give in, let it be to the joy that moves through my heart when I spend time in the company of those who celebrate my existence rather than those who shame the grit that has guaranteed my survival.

If I’m going to pause from the fight, let it be because I was finally able to lay down my sword inside a safe place so that I could simply be who I am.

If I’m going to stop fighting, let it be because there is no longer any need to fight so hard against my own hopelessness and exhaustion. Let it be because my survival is not entirely dependent on grit alone.

I’ve made friends with the fire. I won’t apologize for it. At least these days, I’m fighting for myself — and fighting for ourselves is the most worthy of causes.

We are worthy of creating authentic, beautiful lives. We are worthy of living them while honoring the things that we want and need.

If we have to fight for that life and our own survival, so be it.