Fight or flight

When faced with a threat, we have two main instinctual responses: fight or flight.

To fight is to take your remaining strength and energy to resolve the situation in your life. When you are being threatened or put in an uncomfortable position or situation, you can take your pure passion and ferocity and hope to come out with minimal damage. But to fight is also to invest yourself in your cause. When we choose to fight, we advocate for our dignity and worth to be recognized when others may not take us seriously. But over time, the constant fight becomes tiresome. The investment of energy into trying to gain a basic sense of security and decency starts to become a sunk cost you cannot mentally dig yourself out of when those around you don’t even recognize your struggle. Every protest and argument and debate about your feelings and boundaries begins to become a punchline and the rightful anger that was once a fire has become burnt out. 

Your next option is flight. Stop engaging with those who make you feel unworthy, bad about yourself, or even just annoy you. When they try to bait you into a debate or argument about your life, walk away. Take the energy you’ve invested into the constant fight and invest in yourself. Energy and stress spent on negative interactions with those that only want to make you angry and waste your time can be spent on self-care, school work, and positive experiences in safe spaces with those that appreciate and respect you.

There comes a point in many women’s lives when the fight becomes too overbearing and it just has to be let go. It isn’t healthy to continue to waste energy on those with bad intentions when that energy can be put towards more positive and productive things. Those that look down on you and don’t respect you almost never have any value to add to your life and engaging them only brings negative influences into your life. Only recently have I learned that it’s okay to not let people into my life if I know they aren’t good for me. It has been hard to repress the taught need to please others and avoid conflict at all cost, but the constant fight for respect and self-control to not lash out at those demeaning me has made me a more negative and resentful person. Learning to deal with the social fallout of leaving behind people who have hurt me (intentionally or not) has been a struggle, but over time I’ve developed the strength to resist the fight and walk away for my own self-preservation.