I’ve been living in a state of victim mentality for more than half of my life. Since the bullying in ninth grade, since the assaults, since the mentally and emotionally abusive relationships, I have lived the life of a victim. I blamed all of the above for where my life ended up, for the mistakes I made. I felt sorry for myself and excused everything else away.
I both clung to the past and wanted to escape it, pretend it didn’t happen. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted a normal life. I tried to pretend, but I constantly felt left out, left behind, not thought of at all. I wasted so much time in my twenties, desperate to have the experiences I missed out on in my teens. I clung to this as an excuse for my immature and irresponsible behavior.
I want to learn to take responsibility instead of using my past as an excuse for my present life. It as been years since anything bad has happened to me, that wasn’t at my own hands, so why am I still allowing the effects of past situations to continue to hold me back?
I have survived a lot and I haven’t dealt with any of it yet. It took until my thirties to start seeking help for everything. I survived and I am recovering.
If I continue to live in these “poor me,” and “why me” states of mind, then I am never going to move on with my life. If I want to grow or heal or find out what I am really capable of, I have to stop leaning on this victim mentality, let go of the excuses, and take accountability for where I could be showing up differently.
All of this may be a part of me, but it doesn’t get to control me anymore. All that has happened to me has made me whoever I am today and will be tomorrow, whoever I will be after I finally release it all. I know I have potential, but I have to break down this protective barrier of victimhood to find it.
How many years of my life have I lost to this? How much of my life was wasted because I was busy surviving instead of growing up? What are the consequences of that? Are the repercussions of that not at least partially where my life ended up, the mistakes I made because of the coping mechanisms I found, because of the abuse I was enduring?
Years I should have spent growing up and having experiences, I spent in states of mania and depression. Throughout my twenties, I felt like a teenager with adult privileges. I felt out of control at times. I had no self-discipline. I gave in to my impulses easily.
I have found it curious that as a child or adolescent, I was always told that I was mature for my age. Why was that, and what changed it? Was it the bullying or was it something before that? What stunted my growth?
I haven’t grieved all these years that I have lost, experiences I missed out on, or messed up because of what I have been through. There is a direct connection from the way I was treated to the behaviors I created during my survival and when I was acting out of character, it was a mask I wore, pretending to be okay, pretending to be someone I am not.
After the bullying happened, I seemed to attract situations that would continue to fuck me up even more. I couldn’t drink responsibly, I didn’t know how and was desperate to fit in. I was easy to get drunk, trying to be cool enough. I just wanted to be wanted, to be accepted. Sometimes this landed me in scary situations that I would suddenly wake up and be unable to escape from. Alcohol was always involved. I always believed it was my fault.
I was never okay again after those situations, not really. They haunted me, internally and in my external environment. I didn’t know how to act, what to do, so I just pretended nothing happened. I was in complete denial, even to myself. I walked around hiding my pain, hiding the shame. It was exhausting.
There has always been this underlying pain that I live with because I never dealt with any of it, just kept burying it under more shit. I carry all of the pain and emotions to this day because I don’t know how to just let it go. I developed differen’t behaviors and coping mechanisms over the years, trying to deal with the pain, but most of them were just as damaging to my life and mental health.
I spent my life hiding this pain, pretending I was okay to not be a bother to others. It was only this past year or so that I have been able to be free with my emotions and not care so much who sees. I couldn’t keep holding it into myself. Hiding my pain, not being honest about what I was going through, has been detrimental to my mental health and ability to heal. I wasted all my energy putting on a good face.
Wearing different masks is exhausting. Pretending to be okay when you’re not is unhealthy. Pretending doesn’t make it go away. It makes it worse because you’re forcing yourself to be alone in it. I finally had to admit to myself that I needed help. I didn’t want to live that way anymore.
It has been a couple of years since I have been getting help, but it is time for me to take a step forward and start taking care of myself more, taking more responsibility for myself and my life. If I want my life to look different then I have to learn how to stop clinging to my pain and explore what it could be like to live without it, to let it go.
I don’t want my past to have a chokehold over me anymore. I am trying to learn how to make that happen. I don’t want to be a victim of this pain from years ago. I want to get over it and move on. I want my life to be bigger than that. I don’t want to waste anymore time holding myself back.
These past experiences may be a part of me and maybe they always will be in a way, but I don’t need to keep carrying it around with me every day, I can learn to set it down and remove it from the center of my life. It is time to leave it behind and move on.
Brittany Netzband 