women wearing a black shirt that reads victim crossed out and survivor in big words

From Victim to Survivor: The Story Behind My Most Powerful Shirt

September 3, 2025

I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to stop being a victim. It was a long, jagged road. Losing my son and my daughter cracked me open in ways I didn’t think I’d survive. The grief was heavy, and instead of facing it, I numbed it with drugs, chaos, and shutting down.

For a while, victim was the only role I knew how to play.

But I reached a point where I couldn’t keep living that way. My children’s lives were cut short—if I stayed stuck, I was letting their loss define me forever. That wasn’t honoring them. That wasn’t honoring myself.

That’s when I made the shift: from victim to survivor.

Why the Word Survivor Matters

Statistics show that I’m far from alone. About 1 in 4 women in the U.S. has experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner. Nearly half of women (48.4%) experience psychological aggression from a partner in their lifetime. Abuse—whether physical or emotional—shapes too many of our stories.

And grief is everywhere. More than 57% of Americans have experienced a major loss in just the past three years. Almost a third of them lost a family member or close friend.

With numbers like that, it’s no wonder so many of us feel broken. But here’s the truth: statistics don’t get to decide our identity. We do.

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Making the Choice

I realized I had two options:

Keep wearing victimhood like a second skin, letting pain dictate every move.
Or start climbing out, one day, one choice at a time, and call myself what I truly was: a survivor.

That’s the moment the “Victim → Survivor” shirt was born. Not as a fashion statement, but as a declaration.

Clothing as Storytelling

There’s history in this. Since 1990, the Clothesline Project has used t-shirts to honor survivors of violence and grief—tens of thousands of shirts strung up as public testimony. A shirt can be more than fabric. It can be a voice when your throat still shakes.

That’s what this design means for me. It’s a piece of my story stitched into cotton. And I know I’m not the only one who needs the reminder.

For Anyone Who Needs It

If you’ve walked through abuse, addiction, grief, or trauma, you already know: survival isn’t neat. It’s messy. It’s choosing again and again not to give up, even when it would be easier to stay down.

This shirt is for you. For the woman who’s done letting her past hold the pen. For the one who wants to wear her strength like armor. For the one who’s tired of the word victim and ready to step into something new.

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