The layers of victimhood go deep and wide. The victim morphs and moulds itself to take on different identities and roles in order to mislead and misrepresent itself. The victim as the saviour. The victim as the selfless. The victim as the one who’s worried to offend other people, which may appear to come out of compassion for others, but really is just the product of self-concern, as it’s essentially driven by the fear of how we’ll be perceived.
The fear of how others perceive us is driven by the fear of how we perceive and experience ourselves. When we peel off all the layers of victimhood, at the most fundamental level we are always a victim of our self-perception: of the ongoing stream of feedback we give ourselves about what we’re doing, how we’re being, and how we’re experiencing ourselves. Are we falling within what we’ve categorised as good experiences of ourselves— whatever they may be: intelligent, powerful, successful, impressive, caring, etc.—or not?
Self-perception is a form of victimhood because it creates a compulsion to think of ourselves in a certain way in order to be okay—which makes our wellbeing contingent on these thoughts. And whenever we’re dependent on something, we’re at its effect and hence victims of it. In this case, victims of our self-imposed standards for self-perception. But if our happiness is dependent on our satisfaction with ourselves, why don’t we just grant this satisfaction to ourselves, rather than create conditions we need to fulfil to win it?
It is often fear that makes us imagine that we need to meet certain standards. We think that otherwise we won’t be accepted, loved, safe, i.e. we won’t be okay—but, a) we’re the one thinking this!, b) we’re not okay in not meeting them either, and c) we likely have ample evidence to the contrary.
Essentially, we set the criteria we should meet for us to be okay and we imagine we won’t be okay otherwise. Instead, we can be fully responsible for the imagination and see it for what it is—constructed, by us.
Because whatever we’re worried about—that there’s something wrong with us, that we’re unlovable, that we are different, that we don’t belong, that we are not successful enough, we likely have plenty of proof that we are not these things. Even if, at times, we have been them—we haven’t been them all the time, which by definition means that they don’t define us. And they, certainly, are not our real nature, which I believe to be limitless, abundant and powerful.