Best For:
Individuals still healing from toxic relationships, adult children unpacking old wounds, people struggling with feeling “behind” in life, people learning to set boundaries, or anyone rebuilding their identity after losing themselves while outgrowing survival mode.
The Vault:
- Why survival mode sometimes disguises itself as personality.
- The grief nobody talks about when you outgrow yourself.
- Why healing can make you feel behind in life.
- Signs you may be carrying survival habits you no longer need.
- What mushrooms, muddy trails, and growth have in common.
- What moving into a bigger home taught me about making room for myself.
- Learning the difference between becoming someone new & becoming more yourself.
- Questions to ask when old versions of you no longer fit.
Outgrowing Survival Mode & Pieces of You :
Storia: Future Self Coach the app I use to journal asked me a question the other day that had absolutely no business coming in this hot: “What are you outgrowing?”
Pause one second. That’s a really personal question for a little digital flower on my phone to get my wheels turning about. If you know me you know I can’t give a simple single lane answer, like Shrek and onions I have layers.
I couldn’t just keep it short and collect my emotional participation trophy. Instead, I found myself sitting there staring at the screen like I’d just been personally attacked by a houseplant that doubles as a journal.
The longer I sat with it, the bigger the question became.
Most of us think about outgrowing obvious stuff that might be a little cliche. We usually land on things like our thought patterns, trends, dead-end jobs, and toxic relationships .
Maybe old habits if we’re feeling extra fancy in that moment. What we don’t typically do is think about outgrowing ourselves.
Did you realize the moment you outgrew survival mode, old wounds, or your people-pleasing tendencies?
I didn’t think so; This is where things got uncomfortable.
“Sir, you seem to think suffering is part of the admission price for love.”
I started realizing some of the things I thought were personality traits might’ve actually been three survival habits in a trench coat wearing a fake mustache and trying not to look too obvious.
What a rude way to wake up.
“I want to be 17 again so I can ruin my life differently. I have a lot of new ideas.”
Naturally I did what any emotionally responsible adult with Wi-Fi would do: I sat with it, overthought it, wandered into some memories, accidentally found a few hard truths, and somehow ended up questioning whether growth is really becoming somebody new.
The worst part was, realizing it wasn’t at all wrong.
Unfortunately.
Could growth be finally making room for the person you’ve been all along?
Let’s get into it.
Survival Wears a Lot of Costumes:
For a long time I think I confused surviving with living, and surviving wears a lot of disguises. Sometimes survival looks obvious; your friend staying in those relationships too long because she is hoping her effort can save something. What about when you try carrying things that were never yours to bear the weight of. It would seem along the line you learned that loving people meant absorbing damage.
I don’t know where half of us got these invisible instructions from, but a lot of us seem to walk around with this idea that to deserve love we need to prove how much pain we can tolerate first.
Real quality life advice there, I mean seriously five stars. I would not recommend.
The thing is, I don’t even think I realized I was doing it while I was doing it. Does anyone?
I feel like most of us don’t, at least. You’re inside it while it’s happening, and that places you much too close to the situation to see the full picture. You’re making decisions with the understanding you have at the time, and later on Future You shows up with all this wisdom and acts real judgmental like, “Well obviously…”
Oh wow.
Thanks.
Real helpful now.
Along the Way I Outgrew the Old Me:
People talk about outgrowing jobs, relationships, ways-of-thinking, and phases. Yet, they don’t talk enough about outgrowing the emotional things. We seldom hear people be vulnerable and say, “I outgrew the old me.”
If we’re being totally honest, there is grief there too. A longing for pieces of yourself you thought you left behind hidden just below the surface, lurking and waiting for you to notice its presence.
Even the version created out of survival is still us. As much as it hurts the you that decided to do the thing you regret the most, is still you. The version who always carried too much or accepting less than he deserves, embarrassing as it is was still me.
I spent years trying to understand myself while it felt like everybody else had already figured out the assignment. I watched people much younger than me who were building careers, buying houses, finding direction, and walking around acting like they came with factory instructions.
“Sir, that wasn’t falling behind. That was pruning and you were trying to grow during a drought.”
Meanwhile I was over here assembling myself out of grief, poetry, trails, unanswered questions, and whatever scraps I could forage.
It turned out that building yourself is still building something. I eventually just realized it doesn’t come with a graduation ceremony, round of applause, or typical beauty.
The Call of Nature:
I swear nature notices things before I do.
I was up at Flint Ridge recently with Luna after days of heavy rain. The ground was completely soaked. As if the earth had hit capacity and physically could not hold another drop of water.
Hey rain clouds Mother Earth called and said Ohio has had enough.
Somehow this local hike I’ve done more than most others is where everything woke up. Mushrooms everywhere,the tiniest growths pushing up through wet ground as if they’d been waiting on exactly that moment. Green everything, soaked in the color of regrowth. Even the Earth outgrows itself.
Now if that ain’t a rude little metaphor.
Growth does that. Makes you swear you’ve carried too much already, then life says, “Here hold this have some more.” When you’re at your capacity and feel like there’s no room left.
Yet, more and more things continue to grow there anyway.
Outgrowing Yourself or Making More Room:
Funny enough, I’m literally moving right now. Just a few doors down, but the new place is bigger, more space for our lives to actually spread out a little.
There’s room for my rock garage creative stuff, side endeavors, reading corners, quiet spaces, and Kelsey’s things. Boy oh boy, does Kelsey have a lot of things. There will also be space for Luna to run inside a fence; our kitty boys can run around too. We will be able to exist more freely without everybody feeling stacked on top of each other.
I keep thinking growth may look a lot like that too.
Outgrowing yourself doesn’t have to mean becoming somebody new. It doesn’t mean you are throwing away every version of who you were before in the trash can. It’s just the realization you’ve been trying to squish your entire life into spaces that were too small.
The old versions of us weren’t failures out right or at all. Maybe they were just rooms we eventually grew too big to be in anymore.
Maybe You’re Not Lost – Final Thoughts:
After all of this, I think that little flower app owes me an apology or at least some flower. Yes, singular, meaning pass the Mary Jane. That question had entirely too much audacity.
I started this whole thing thinking I was going to answer a simple prompt, grow my digital flower, and move on with my day. Instead I ended up wandering through survival habits, old versions of myself, grief.
Rude.
Through this I did come to realize outgrowing your old self doesn’t have to mean getting rid of every piece of you.
I think a lot of us do this on accident and spend years thinking we’re behind everyone else, convinced we missed some grand orientation meeting where people handed out life manuals. Until one day we wake up and realize maybe we weren’t failing. We were just building something different, ourselves.
Look at all the layers of you buried under survival, guilt, and what you let weigh you down. Did you also think you had to?
“Sir, respectfully, you’ve been calling yourself lost while you were busy growing roots.”
I’m curious now:
Is there something you are you outgrowing, you haven’t admitted to yourself yet?
What habits, relationships, or beliefs started as survival but quietly unpacked their bags and moved into your personality?
Are there old versions of you that you still carry around? Do you miss the ones you let go, or just miss how they helped you survive?
Feel free to answer any of these questions in the comments, write your answer in your journal, or sit with it and just think awhile.
Don’t blame me if a tiny flower app starts calling you out too.
TLDR:
Growth is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like outgrowing survival habits, old wounds, and versions of you that once kept you safe.
Many of us mistake coping mechanisms and survival responses for personality traits. We do not always realize it until they stop fitting.
Feeling “behind” in life does not always mean you failed. You may have been busy building yourself in ways others missed.
Outgrowing old versions of yourself can hurt even when growth is necessary; healing isn’t a pleasant ride through and through.
Growth isn’t always becoming a new person. It is also making room for the person you have been all along.
Ask yourself: What am I outgrowing right now, and what parts of me no longer fit?
Read Some More:
Psychology Today – Chronic Stress & Survival Mode as A Personality Trait
ShiftGrit – Mourning Versions of Yourself
Storia -Let’s be Friends on
Doing Enough a Journal Entry
Leave a Reply