The irony of hope and self-victimisation

It should be so funny, that I am writing after receiving an email from a post-doc fellow about the atrocities of my use of the English language. Okay, she didn't quite write it that way, but essentially, that was the meaning behind the grade. I am bummed of course, but that's what you need to receive to be better.

In any case, I was reading thought catalog, on a whim, on "how to meet the love of your life". I understand that the writing is supposed to inspire people, and it certainly has, from time to time, inspired me. However, after that email episode, a whatsapp conversation about society's view of fat people, my own cynicism and a friend's frustration with a counsellor's judgemental attitude of making a casual sweeping statement that she is simply just "playing the victim"phew, it has made me look at that article in a different light. I agree with them, and what they are writing. However I wish to emphasize something even more - the whole idea of self-victimisation.

I am guilty of doing it, and on more than one occasion too. I believe it comes from a place of immense despair and sadness, when your life just hasn't been working out the way you want it to. It emanates from a long period of receiving nothing but bad news and why should anyone have hope, when things have been nothing but negative. So we tell ourselves, that perhaps this is the way life is for me. Perhaps someone up there really finds it a joke to make my life a living hell. What do we do after that?

Self-vicitimisation strangely, is a form of hope working through and coping with the "bad news" in our lives. We know that this is not the way things should be, and expectation of better things, despite reality being the opposite, is something that puts the self in self-victimisation. A victim is someone who is treated badly, and yet has no expectation of better except only through the lenses of others. A child in ethiopia is a victim, because they have no concept of what is "better" out there. However, self-victimisation is an acute awareness that this is not the way things SHOULD be. The crippling effect of the situation pushes the energy that should instead be used to transform things around us, to be used to gain sympathy from others in hope that they will pull us out of this rut in the first place.

I am not apologising for self-victimisers, neither am I advertising that self-victimisation is a good thing (what is good anyway?). I am trying to bring light to an issue that is shrouded with pain, disgust and pessimism. Self-victimisation stems from hope, and because there is hope and expectations of better things yet, the energy that spring from hope, can also be used in a destructive way. It can be used to create waves of negative energy and like a blackhole, swallow the energy of those around them. They become energy and emotional vampires, they transform into melodramatists, and more importantly, they can be used to using that energy for themselves, rather than for others. I do not mean you start doing things for other people. After all, you can do it for others in hopes of bringing upon more people to pat you on the head like a good dog, which is just another form of self-victimisation. Perhaps I am referring to a fundamental shift in attitude, to empower yourself with the mantra that "that's it, I won't take this shit any longer" and start changing things around you, a little at a time, that will make a positive difference. It could be small things like deleting "friends" on facebook, or leaving a destructive relationship, or simply, just telling your mother that you are 29 instead of 9.

Self-victimisation is a form of selfish indulgence, that is fundamentally from a good place of hope and wishfulness. It's not the why, but the how that is the issue here. All blackholes started as suns, you must have felt immense happiness before to be reduced to the despondent situation you are in now. Blackholes are bottomless pits, and self-victimisation just keeps on taking but never ever filling. However, blackholes are also the centre of many galaxies, and good can come out from that. We just need to channel that energy to the bastards that made our life depressing in the first place.

加油！