For most of my life, I thought survival was the finish line.
When you grow up surrounded by instability, you learn how to adapt long before you ever learn how to rest. You become good at carrying things quietly. You learn how to keep functioning even when your world feels uncertain underneath you. Bills still need to be paid. Responsibilities still exist. Life keeps moving whether you are emotionally ready for it or not.
Growing up, stability never felt guaranteed. There was always something looming in the background: financial stress, addiction, illness, grief, emotional exhaustion. I learned early on what it felt like to worry about money before I was old enough to fully understand it. I remember the fear of another eviction notice showing up. The tension that filled a room when bills were overdue. I remember watching my mother struggle to hold everything together while my father’s emotional instability could turn an ordinary day into screaming, curses, or unnecessary fights, most of them rooted in financial insecurity and stress that hung over the house constantly.
And somehow, in the middle of all of that, I still learned how to smile, go to work, answer questions, and pretend everything was normal.
By the time I was 13, I was already working at Carmine’s Pizza, making boxes and cleaning dishes for $6 an hour, off the books. At 16, I started working at McDonald’s for $7.25 an hour. While other kids were thinking about sports games, extracurricular clubs, prom, or what college they wanted to go to, I was thinking about helping pay bills, making sure I had enough gas money to get to work, and trying not to become another person swallowed by instability.
Life felt less like something I was building, and more like something I was simply trying to survive.
At 31 years old, I’m finally finishing my bachelor’s degree at CUNY York College. By my next birthday, I will have begun my Master’s program in Public Health Policy & Management.
Even writing that feels emotional, because there were years when a future like this stopped feeling possible.
There were years in my 20s where I carried so much shame about falling behind that I lied to friends about finishing school. I kept conversations surface-level because it felt easier to let people believe I already had my degree than explain everything happening underneath my life. It felt easier to protect myself from embarrassment than admit how overwhelmed, lost, and emotionally exhausted I really was.
Back in 2013, I attended University at Albany for three semesters before financial instability forced me to leave. I could not secure loans, eventually accumulated nearly $30,000 in debt to the university, and later had my transcript and credits withheld because of the outstanding balance. Years later, after working nonstop and trying to rebuild my life piece by piece, I found myself retaking classes I had already completed just to continue moving forward, pushing the finish line back another three semesters.
When you watch everyone else move forward, it makes you feel like you’ve somehow fallen behind in life. But the truth is, surviving family instability, financial stress, grief, emotional exhaustion, and the pressure of pretending everything was okay took more out of me than anybody ever realized.
There’s a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from feeling like the finish line keeps moving back every time you finally get close to it.
This degree means more than a diploma. It is proof that even during the years I doubted myself most, withdrew from people, and questioned whether I would ever find my way back, I still kept going.
Because survival does not leave much room for falling apart. You are already so far behind that there is no space for more regression.
Over time, the work I did became deeply personal to me because a lot of my understanding of people and health began at home.
Growing up around substance use, chronic illness, mental health struggles, grief, bouts of homelessness, and constant financial instability changed the way I see the world. I experienced what it feels like to live with uncertainty hanging over everything. Evictions became so common throughout my life that I need at least two hands to count them all. I learned early how quickly stability can disappear, and how exhausting it is to constantly rebuild while pretending you are okay.
I watched how quickly suffering becomes invisible once someone is labeled instead of supported. I watched people I loved become reduced to their worst moments instead of being seen as human beings carrying pain they did not know how to survive.
My sister’s struggle with addiction deeply shaped me. Loving someone through addiction changes the emotional atmosphere of an entire family. There are periods of hope, moments where things feel stable again, and moments where everything suddenly falls apart without warning. You spend years living somewhere between fear and hope.
For a long time, I thought survival was the finish line.
I finally felt like I was finding my way back around 25. I was working for the State and earning six figures without a degree, something that once would have felt impossible considering where I started.
Then, in 2022, I lost my mother unexpectedly.
She had been a nurse for over thirty years. Most of her life was spent caring for other people while quietly carrying her own pain physically, emotionally, and mentally.
The day she died, I was on my way to work at a COVID vaccination site. I still remember how surreal everything felt afterward.
One of the hardest parts of grief is realizing the world keeps moving after yours suddenly stops. Traffic continues. Grocery stores stay crowded. Conversations continue around you while your own life suddenly feels frozen in place.
After my mother passed away, everything felt unreal. For a brief moment, I thought maybe life was finally going to let me breathe.
Her inheritance and life insurance were supposed to total nearly half a million dollars. And as painful as it is to admit out loud, part of me thought: maybe this is finally it. Maybe I can stop living in survival mode. Maybe I can finally rest without feeling guilty for it.
But that feeling disappeared almost immediately.
Not long after she passed, we were informed by Northwell Health that because my mother had technically been classified as “terminated due to disability” before her death, her term life insurance policy was no longer active.
Just like that, it was gone.
The future I thought might finally exist disappeared in a single conversation.
Back to zero. Honestly, not even zero. Back into the negative.
Funeral expenses. Rent. Debt. Bills. Taking care of the family. Trying to hold everything together while grieving someone who had spent her entire life holding everyone else together first.
There was never really space to fully fall apart because survival still had to continue. I still had work. Still had responsibilities. Still had to figure out how to keep moving through a life that no longer felt familiar.
And I think that was one of the loneliest parts of grief.
Realizing that even after losing someone you love, the world still expects you to keep functioning like your heart was not just shattered open.
For most of my life, survival looked like endurance. Keep functioning. Keep working. Keep carrying everything quietly long enough to make it to tomorrow.
But somewhere along the way, I started realizing survival and healing are not the same thing.
The moments that changed me most were not the moments where I survived silently. They were the moments where people showed up for me with compassion when they did not have to. The moments where someone listened. The moments where someone reminded me I did not have to carry everything alone.
That understanding slowly shaped the way I approach both my work and my life.
Today, I work in public health, supporting HIV and sexual health programs, trainings, and community-based care throughout New York. But my understanding of people did not come from textbooks.
It came from lived experience.
It came from watching people suffer quietly because they were too ashamed, too unsupported, or too overwhelmed to ask for help. It came from understanding how deeply trauma, grief, addiction, poverty, identity, and loneliness shape the way people move through the world.
Some of the most meaningful parts of my life have centered around the LGBTQ+ community.
Through Pride for Youth, I have helped support LGBTQ+ youth through workshops, prevention work, and community spaces built around safety, connection, and belonging. As someone who understands what it feels like to search for acceptance and stability, this work has always felt personal to me.
I have also stayed involved with Gotham Volleyball, which to some people may simply look like sports. But community matters more than people realize.
Sometimes healing begins in ordinary places.
Shared routines. Laughter after long weeks. People remembering your name. Feeling like you belong somewhere.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I also volunteered overnight on crisis hotlines throughout New York. Those conversations still stay with me. Complete strangers calling in the middle of the night because they were grieving, isolated, overwhelmed, or simply needed another human voice on the other end of the line.
Those experiences reinforced something I carry with me every day: people remember how you show up for them during the hardest moments of their lives.
Now, as I get closer to finishing my degree, I think a lot about the version of myself who once believed survival itself was enough.
Back then, survival felt like the goal.
Now I understand survival was never the finish line.
The finish line is peace.
Real peace. The kind where your body no longer feels trapped in survival mode. Where your nervous system is not constantly cycling through fight, flight, or freeze without you even realizing it. Where you are no longer bracing for the next phone call, the next crisis, the next loss, or the next moment that changes everything again.
The kind of peace where your body finally understands it is safe.
Safe to rest.
Safe to breathe deeply.
Safe to exist without constantly preparing for something terrible to happen.
The finish line is stability.
Not constantly wondering what will fall apart next. Not measuring every month by whether you survived it financially, emotionally, or mentally. Not feeling like you always have to prove your worth, overextend yourself, or carry everything alone just to deserve a sense of security.
It is learning how to live in the present instead of constantly anticipating disaster. Learning how to enjoy small, ordinary moments without guilt. A quiet morning. A full night of sleep. A peaceful drive home where your chest does not tighten the second your phone rings.
A life where your body is no longer surviving every moment as if it were an emergency.
But most importantly, the finish line is healing.
Not perfect healing. Not the polished version people post online wrapped in inspirational quotes and forced positivity.
Real healing.
The kind where you stop pretending every painful thing that happened to you was somehow necessary just because you survived it.
There is a quote by Kelly Clarkson that says, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” And maybe, in some ways, survival does create resilience. Pain reshapes you. It teaches you endurance.
But surviving something does not automatically make it fair.
It does not mean you should have had to experience it, often alone, and carry the weight of the trauma afterward.
Some experiences do not leave behind inspirational lessons about strength.
Some simply leave scars that never should have been there in the first place.
Real healing is learning to acknowledge that honestly.
It is understanding that trauma changes people. It changes your nervous system, your relationships, your sense of safety, and the way you move through the world long after the crisis ends. Strength is not pretending you were unaffected. Strength is being honest about what hurt you.
For most of my life, I thought strength meant continuing forward no matter how exhausted, overwhelmed, or emotionally broken I felt inside.
Now I understand something different.
Healing is not pretending the damage never happened. Healing is finally realizing the emergency is over, even if your body still has not caught up yet.
And maybe the hardest part of healing is accepting that you deserve peace after spending so many years convinced your only purpose was to survive.
The finish line is creating a life where I no longer have to choose between surviving and dreaming about the future at the same time. After a lifetime of bracing for impact, there is something deeply emotional about finally allowing yourself to believe that life is not only something you survive.
Life can become something you wake up excited to live. Something peaceful. Something stable. Something safe.
And there is a quiet kind of heartbreak in realizing how long you went without believing you deserved that in the first place.
In Health & Healing,
Yours Truly,
Nicholas Dantuono (he/him)
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