Hello world,
Today I’d like to talk a little bit about something I’ve been more conscious of: self-victimization.
Brace yourself because this will be a long post.
Let me start with the context!
I started January anxious and exhausted, even though I had some of by best friends home for a week (actually it helped make it better).
I was learning how to navigate grief after loosing my best friend’s mom, who I had known for 20 years, in November.
Before that I had already lost people close to me, but emotionally speaking, never that close.
So it was a brand new experience, and during that same period we discovered that someone in my partner’s family had a brain tumor.
Not exactly the best context to celebrate the holidays…
Close to Christmas, my grandpa had to be hospitalized and almost died.
I had seen my grandparents in September and he was already not doing very well, but this event marked a significant drop in his health status.
Come January, I discover something that shook me to my core (I honestly felt like I was about to have a heart attack reading it initially): due to traveling often + moving houses mid-2023, I fucked up and forgot to declare my IRS for 2022.
I had not noticed since in Portugal in the regime I was in, I was paying IRS every 3 months…except that I discovered later that they were premptive payments for 2023.
Long story short, I owed the IRS twelve thousand euros.
LOL, what?!
Keep in mind that while I had saved a good chunk of money (10k) until early 2023, since I completely miscalculated my taxes I thought I was out of the woods and used that money to travel, to buy furniture and other expenses related to our moving in May.
So by early 2024 it was all pretty much gone.
These news freaked me the f* out.
For even more context, when I was a teenager my mom struggled for quite a few years due to a divorce and huge move, plus being a single mom of 3.
She did her very best and honestly I’m so proud of her for that, because she truly always made us a priority, yet it left some deep fears about money insecurity.
So when I got the news in January, emotionally I regressed immediately and started panicking: how was I going to pay that amount if I didn’t have the money available?
From that point on, it’s almost as if my confidence in my ability to make money on my own (as I’ve done so for the past 3 years) was simply gone!
Despite my partner and close friends reassurance, I simply felt paralized inside. Unable to solve this problem.
Which brings me to another topic that I’ll eventually dwelve into, which is the fact that not everybody is meant to be their own boss! And even less to start a company that employ others!
Anyway, I disgress.
We’ll talk about that another day.
So to recap: grief + stress related to my grandpa + panic due to my financial situation = I was a mess.
And guess what.. I had no clue what was coming yet.
My grandpa died in late February.
This is another thing I want to talk about eventually because loosing him has been such a transformative experience, I’m at loss for words right now yet I know I have a lot to say about this.
But as you can imagine, it only made things worse.
I immediately went to France for the funeral, stayed there a bit and when I came back home, it felt like I was merely a shadow, a ghost, a zombie.
If you’ve lost someone you love you can probably relate to this extremely weird sensation of not feeling like yourself.
Add a good amount of mental fog and you’ve got the perfect recipe for disaster.
The worst part is that I had some cool projects to work on, but I really deeply struggled to focus and work. It felt impossible, both mentally and physically.
Eventually, I let the sadness take over and entered depression again.
This isn’t my first rodeo and I think this is exactly where I went wrong this year.
Instead of asking for even more (professional) help and trying to heal on a physical level as well, I simply just… gave up.
It was progressive but I let my negative thoughts feed other negative thoughts, and it just kept on piling up.
In April another person that I knew died of suicide.
Slightly above my age. Kind, funny, always in a good mood — or so it seemed.
The year felt cursed.
Instead of examining these events individually, I sort of bundled them up and, of course, they looked way worse that way.
This depression also brought an interesting yet exhausting new facet: existential crisis.
Nothing made sense.
I had no more patience for anything, which is very unsual for me.
I felt irritated, lost, physically exhausted and mentally depleted.
All the challenges summed together felt too big for me to tackle.
My confidence just went down the drain, and I couldn’t find joy in anything besides immediate, simple things like a cup of coffee, a walk with my dog, a TV show.
What I realize now, is that while many of these events were out of my control, the way I reacted to them wasn’t.
Even when it feels like you’re not in control… you are.
I’m not turning against myself, I still remember just how hard it felt to feel in control.
Which now brings me back to the topic of the day: self-victimization.
I realize now that, while maybe unconsciously, this chain of events triggered something in me which “forced” me to see myself as a victim.
If I’m being completely honest with you, and with myself, this is not the first time it happened.
Therapy has been a great help because over the past 2 years it has helped me confront all aspects of my personality and most importantly my mental limitations.
For years I have been keeping myself in mental cages ; kept myself in a victim position.
While it’s mostly unconscious, I’m not completely out of responsability in this behavior.
Why do we see ourselves and act like victims?
Let me just take a second that there is a difference between acknowledging the situations and potential abuse that happened to you, and acting like a victim.
You can be a victim and not act or feel like one.
I’m struggling to find words that convey with exactitude what I’m trying to say, so let me share this image instead for now:
When we place ourselves in the role of the victim in our life, we take away our reponsability and our agency. Our power, our control.
It’s very insidious because you probably don’t realize that you’re doing it (until it becomes evident), and it keeps you from liberating yourself by changing what isn’t serving you anymore.
It is of the most crucial importance that we take responsability and control for our lives.
Life will happen to you, like it does to all of us, but you also happen to life.
You play the main role in determining your future.
One resource that has helped me over the past few months is the book Staring at the sun by Irvin D. Yalom.
The book was recommended to me by my therapist and while I’m not done reading it (almost), I really appreciated the chapter that shared thoughts about life, death, regrets and alignement from ancient philosophers and writers.
The wisdom that these people had is mindblowing.
It brought me a lot of comfort and peace, and it also helped me realize that during this year I had pretty much completely abandonned my self-agency which was (I guess) a form of self-sabotage that validated the negative thoughts that kept on invading my head.
Action is the solution.
Nike might be onto something with their slogan.
But really, is there a better way to face perhaps our deepest fear, the fear of death, than by doing?
It’s only my interpretation and it might be very personal but I realized this year, to my own surprise, that I am in fact afraid of dying.
Or so I thought. But upon further examination, it’s actually the opposite: I think I’m deeply afraid of living.
I’ve grown so comfortable being stuck in the same patterns, with the same pains, and the same mental limitations that visualizing a life that is free of suffering feels frightening.
It goes back to the existential crisis of earlier: who am I if not my trauma? if not my past?
As of now, I don’t have the answer.
It has yet to be written.
If you don’t mind, I’ll stop here for now and I’ll revisit some of these topics in other posts.
I hope it can be useful and maybe resonate with you.
I am a bit sleepy right now so I’ll post this without proofreading it because why not! After all the title of this blog has to serve some purpose! 😂
See you next time,
Camille