I have identified myself as being a victim for a long time now and the sad part is I was made to believe that by my mother and her brothers and their family. So, how does one feel entitled to people's attention, their sympathies, and playing along for their support in some form or the other, my mother grew to be an expert at as she trauma bonded with her widowhood and took me in as a fellow victim to project all her frustrations and criticisms as if my job was to be the receiving end of it while I had no clue that this is code for quick sand and absorbing her victimhood and being party to it unconsciously will just make me one - a victim.
It's as if my basis of self hood rests in being a victim and whatever relationships that I have had was to hide behind the layers of victimhood in order to escape or protect myself from volatile behaviors of people and their frustrations, criticisms etc. I used being a victim as a shield.
A victim to not being present to her life and witnessing her life go by as a third person and depending on my mother (during the teenage-early adult phase specially) to help me by making me feel better about my body. But that feel good never happened and neither did my mother's victimized projections that she loved soaking up owing to her past and projecting on me as if I am not someone separate from her and I just ended up absorbing it all in, criticisms, anger, body shaming, and so on. She never helped me regulate my feelings and I got stuck feeling all her feelings and tried to be good enough for her which I wasn't no matter how hard I tried or how much I tried to suppress my core feelings in order to hold space for hers.
I just became a dependent and just was intellectually separate from her as I believed myself to be but needed her support so that I can get on with my life and live on my choices and terms. But that never happened and I felt like a mere instrument to channelize my empathy for her and hold frozen her frustrations and anger on my too sensitive body and on my father for leaving her widowed and pregnant with me. This emotional turmoil didn't just hit my mother but it also deeply distressed me somewhere right before my being born. I was a born victim and no matter how much I resisted wanting to identify that way, but my highly sensitive body and emotionally dysregulated mind kept me conflicted from within as I sought to seek refuge in my mother's rigid and organized style of living her life. In fact I used to feel safe for not having to deal with my vulnerabilities and true feelings which I perceived were blocking me from staying enmeshed with her which I had gotten tuned to for long and just numbed the need to be true to myself.
I became a victim to ill adapted choices and emotional dysregulations and thrived on a sickly environment overall which I kept mirroring and absorbing and silently regurgitating them all without proactively releasing excessive thoughts which kept me from seeing my present for what it is. Being mindful to my present was something only bookish and ideal but never a healthy choice that I could put my mind to access. It's as if a deep part of me resists feeling well, resists being aligned with my core emotions, and wants me to stay wounded, hurt, confused and distressed about my past and just stressing on trying to get a job so that I can look forward to working on something which again consumes my attention fully in it as some kind of replacement to the old pattern of staying enmeshed with something other than my personal priorities, self growth, and free expression of my emotions, feelings, and vulnerabilities for what it is.
My self esteem has been so badly hit as a result that just thinking my way through wellness and confidence is not going to earn me any. But I have earned my way into all the caves and the darkness where I used to feel safe in order to hide myself and my true wounds and not feeling like a victim while doing so but someone who's curious and caring to unearth my truths but still has to learn more on tuning down my inner critic which makes me feel terribly irresponsible for whatever I could do with my given life.
I will sometime soon voice out in the written way the voice of the critic as is so that I don't confuse responsibility with discernment of situations as is and learn to work on to separate them and go with the flow. It's awareness finally and acknowledging that fully from within and accepting life for what it is, however resolved, broken, damage controlled and so on that this is my lifetime opportunity no matter how long I live to just stay present to my life and participate in it without rushing it or expecting life to work out in some idealistic way for my benefit.
Being enmeshed with life is how I had chosen to live my life but being present to it as is as my choice now and going forward. Being connected to my emotions and feelings by being present to it is a beautiful shift for me - it's taking time but I don't need to make this come into being as life, our present reality happens on its own and we just need to be mindful of it and keep navigating with.
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