Track 31: What Survives After You Do

A field report from the aftermath of survival.

I was gone. Not on vacation. Not on a "healing journey." Not finding myself in a temple with a juice cleanse and a mantra. I was in fight-or-flight so long it became my timezone.

Five months of war drums in my chest. Five months of adrenalized tunnel vision, of forgetting how to exhale. I wasn’t living—I was dodging bullets that hadn’t even been fired yet. Every room felt like a trap. Every moment was a test. And somehow, I passed.

I made it back. I lived through it. Great. Fucking Gold star.

But now I’m standing in my own kitchen, holding a mug I used to love, and I feel...nothing. My body’s home, but my soul is still ducking for cover. Everything’s technically fine, but I’m not fine. I’m twitchy in the silence. I flinch at kindness. The stillness feels like a setup.

And here’s the real mindfuck: I’m not even sure I want to be happy anymore.

Because the truth is, I don’t trust it. I don’t know what to do with softness. I don’t know how to accept peace without dissecting it for wires and explosives. I’m too used to running on smoke and sharp edges. I’m suspicious of joy now. I’m suspicious of relief.

So I’m asking the question out loud: What if I wasn’t built for happiness? What if I was built for something sacred? What if all this pain wasn’t the detour...
…but the damn assignment?

Let’s go there.

---

The Biology of a Haunted Animal

They’ll tell you your body keeps the score. Cute. What they don’t say is that trauma rewrites the entire playbook and suddenly you’re a creature with a pulse and no manual. You don’t “come back” from fight-or-flight. You crawl. One nerve ending at a time. You claw your way out of a reality where everything was a weapon and every moment was a threat assessment.

Your body doesn't care that the emergency is over. Because you were the emergency.

Your system got high on cortisol. Adrenaline became holy water. Your heart learned to gallop on command, and your gut shut down like a diner after a shootout. You forgot how to sleep without rehearsing the worst-case scenario in Dolby Surround. You forgot how to breathe unless someone was choking you with expectation.

And now? You’re back. And your body is a haunted house. Your actual fucking house is a mausoleum of memories. Every creak is something that happened in the past. Every silence is suspect. You’re flinching at peace like it owes you money.

This isn’t PTSD. This is post everything disorder.

People say “Just relax.” You want to punch them in the teeth. You don’t relax when the alarms are still ringing in your spine. You don’t “meditate” when your nervous system is dressed for war. You are not “overreacting.” You are over-survived.

And here’s what nobody says shit about: Coming back to your life after running for your fucking life hurts. Because now you have to feel it. All of it. Not just what happened, but what you had to become to make it through.

A sharper version of you. A colder version. A weaponized version who doesn’t smile in photos anymore. Who can’t take a deep breath without wondering what it’ll cost.

And still, here you are. In your skin. In your breath. Not healed, but here.

And that? That maybe is fucking holy.

Joy Is a Drug You Forgot How to Take

Joy used to be easy. A song hit. A joke landed. A sunset made you shut up for half a second. You felt things: music, skin, wind, God. It wasn’t always perfect, but it happened. Spontaneous combustion in the chest. Unannounced laughter. A flash of light in the cave.

But now? Joy feels like an allergy. Like trying to swallow glass.

People ask if you’re happy and you want to say: “I survived hell. I didn’t come back with fucking balloons.” Because joy doesn’t stick anymore. It slides off you like cheap soap. You’re not numb, you’re anti-absorbent. Pleasure feels suspicious. Stillness feels staged. You get a moment of peace and your brain kicks open the panic room: “Something’s wrong. This is a trick. Get up. Check the exits. Who did you forget to save?”

Happiness doesn’t feel earned. It feels... dangerous. Because if you let it in, what happens when it leaves again? What happens when the floor drops out again? So you ration joy. You sip it with caution. You don’t laugh too hard. You don’t hope too loud.
Because somewhere in the static of your soul, you believe you’re not allowed to keep good things.

You’re not broken. You’re conditioned. To expect the worst. To keep the walls up. To build a life that’s safe from disappointment, even if it means it’s empty.

They say joy is your birthright. You believe it’s a luxury item: sold out, backordered, available only to those who didn’t already ruin themselves trying to survive.

But maybe…

Maybe the problem isn’t that you can’t feel joy. Maybe the problem is that joy requires surrender. And surrender feels like suicide to a survivor.

The Cult of Survival vs. the Church of Meaning

Survival is a cult. It doesn’t look like one. It looks like hustle. Grind. “Doing what you have to.” It looks like spreadsheets, twelve-step slogans, green juice, cortisol-riddled workouts, and pretending you’re fine because you made it through worse.

But it’s still a cult.

And like any cult, it doesn’t love you. It loves what it made you. It made you sharp. Vigilant. Useful. Efficient. You became the emergency contact for everyone else’s disasters. You became the one who “gets shit done.” You became the one who doesn’t cry in public, doesn’t hope out loud, doesn’t fall apart.

You became bulletproof and in the process, you forgot you were ever made of skin.

Because survival doesn’t care if you’re whole. It cares if you’re available. To fight. To fix. To suffer beautifully and still show up to work.

And the lie, the beautiful, poisonous lie was this: “Once you survive, you get to be happy.”

But what if that’s bullshit? What if the point of surviving wasn’t joy? What if the point was initiation? What if the pain didn’t break you, it baptized you?

See, survival is reaction. But meaning, meaning is fucking rebellion.

Meaning is what you build from rubble. Meaning is what you dare to carry when no one would blame you for putting it down. Meaning is not passive. It is not a reward. It is a sword you pull from your own chest. There’s no happiness at the end of the tunnel.
There’s only you. Scorched, stubborn, sacred. Staring at the ashes, whispering: “If this shit wasn’t random… then what the fuck was it?”

That’s the shift. From cult member to disciple. From survivor to priest of your own wreckage.

And that’s where holiness begins. Not in temples. Not in triumph. But in the ugly, holy act of making meaning out of your scars and calling that shit sacred.

The Death of Happy

Let’s kill the lie. Happy was the carrot. The marketing campaign. The consumer-grade Prozac dream they sold you between sitcom reruns and divorce settlements. It was airbrushed. It was aspirational. It had a fucking subscription fee. Happy had a ring to it. A soundtrack. A side hustle. It came with throw pillows and affirmations and brunch photos filtered through Valencia. And you, you, signed up for it like everybody else. You just didn’t read the fucking fine print.

Because happy never came. What came was the hustle. What came was the anxiety of waiting for happiness like it was Amazon Prime and you were three lifetimes into backorder hell.

What came was the crash. The betrayal. The silence. ‘The you on the floor screaming into a wall and still checking your email kind of living.’ And in that moment, on your knees, in the wreckage, with nothing left to sell, prove, or perform, you realized:

Happy isn’t the goal. It’s the fucking bait. And you? You were never built to chase bait. You were built for burning. For holiness. For heaviness. For things that echo through bone and blood and time.

Not smiley face emojis. Not TikTok healing. Not the rusted armor of “positive vibes only.” But grief that rewrites gravity. Love that costs. A life that splits you open, not to destroy you, but to anoint you.

You were made to be set apart. Consecrated by collapse. Sanctified by sorrow.
Chosen by the fire.

So bury it. Bury “happy.” Hold a funeral. Say a prayer. Pour a drink. Then walk away from the grave and never look back.

You didn’t survive this shit to return to a fucking Disney version of life. You survived to become the kind of holy they can’t sell in stores. The kind that haunts. The kind that heals by accident. The kind that walks into rooms and makes people feel their own buried truth crawl up their spine.

And if that isn’t happy? Good.

Becoming The Wound

You want closure? There is none. There is no end scene. No fade-to-black. No breathless kiss where it all makes sense. There’s just you, still fucking here. Pulse like thunder. Eyes like crime scenes. Standing on the scorched remains of the life you barely crawled out of.

And for once, you’re not asking why. You’re not looking for meaning like a beggar. You’re not bargaining with the sky. You’ve stopped hoping for a refund on the damage.

Because now, you carry it. Not like baggage. Not like shame. Like scripture. Like proof. Like every raw, unbearable second was a sacred offering. You are the wound now. Living, breathing, bleeding proof that the fire didn't win.

People will say you look different. That you feel heavier, quieter, sharper. That there's something in your eyes they can’t quite name. They’ll call it wisdom. Strength. Grace.

But you’ll know better. You’re not wise. You’re not healed. You’re just fucking real now. Too real to be palatable. Too holy to be liked.

You don’t want to go back. You don’t want to be soft. You don’t want their version of “whole.”

Because broken wasn’t your downfall. It was your motherfucking coronation.

The wreckage crowned you. The pain gave you language. And the wound? The wound made you a weapon against forgetting.

So no, you’ll never be happy. Not like them.

You’ll be haunted. You’ll be carved. You’ll be stitched together with truth and gasoline.

But you’ll walk into every room carrying the fire they swore you’d never survive. No altar. No answers. Just a scar where a smile used to be and a heartbeat that doesn’t flinch anymore.

And that?

That’s not happy. That’s Unfuckwithable.

---

I don’t ask for peace.
I ask for clarity.
Strip me of what isn’t real.
Let nothing false survive the fire.

I don’t want comfort.
I want truth
even if it ruins me.
Especially if it ruins me.

Make me sharp.
Make me sacred.
Make me dangerous to anything
that demands I shrink to be loved.

I am not here to be liked.
I am not here to be safe.
I am here to become
the storm I begged heaven to send.

---

Amen. Or don’t.
This isn’t for them.

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(Nothing says sacred wound like a voice screaming into the void wrapped in velvet noise. This track floats in that exact liminal space: Between panic and prayer, between falling and flying, between wanting to scream and choosing instead to swallow the storm whole. It’s not a song. It’s a panic attack set to poetry. It’s fear with rhythm. And that last line: “everything’s gotta be love or death,” might as well be carved into my goddamn spine. That’s the gospel now. Love or death. Nothing in between.)