Breaking free from the shell of victimhood
From defeated by the world’s expectations to set herself free in the limitless experience of being alive.
Over the course of 2022, I was struggling to find relevancy in any form of life that was supposed to carry vibrancy to the world. The experience of living came flat in my sense. At the edge of my twenties, I encountered myself in the midst of an existential crisis and lost in despair again. Why do we always fight the same enemy? Whose interest does this crisis serve actually?
I couldn’t make a reason with how modern civilization evolves. Virality is a new engine that drives society to pursue its greatest ambition, and yet may become its worst nightmare in the end. Some of the viral sensations are sufficient to spark change, but many are inherently promoting public shaming and humiliation, and only a few of them represent social justice. The prevalence of casual brutality in social media today is like a failure imagination of a technology-driven culture society thrives to be.
It was more than the value of the content that bothered me. How virality works in a short-term cycle was a complication I could not afford to desensitize. We are not just living in a time where information becomes so saturated, it’s also circulating so damn fast. Our attention keeps changing in split second, the public awareness keeps shifting rapidly. All the information that mattered a minute ago will transform quickly into irrelevancy as a new sensational phenomenon emerges. And in between, I lost my perspective. What I sensed afterward was everything turned out to be pointless, and I began to see the world in its ill-defined meaning.
Behind their content that attracts social discourse and interminable commentary, online media, accounts with a blue checkmark, to anonymous users with a shady avatar and cloying user name are merely conspiring their personal agenda. They just project their own resentment to leverage people’s attention with little intention to gain a strategic winning for social change — that serves a collective purpose.
I knew I should sign out of that hellscape as soon as I could to keep myself composed and untethered, or at least stay online while creating distance from all the self-righteousness remarks and hatred posts that people kept hurling. But, at this point, the amount of negativity I possessed had exceeded the regular degree. I seemed to despise society so much.
A long-ass thread with fancy words of preaching, even if the substance is strongly relevant, has no weight to make a difference in society, it’s uninspired to stop the jolts of virality — the power of impermanence. Nothing will last as something meaningful or radical if society keeps forgetting.
It didn’t occur to me at first that I internalized this aversion way too extreme until it eroded my communal sense. I had become so disinterested to include myself in the matter of social relations. I stopped scrolling down the timeline and reading the news. I didn’t give a care about any fuss in social media, or even controversial affairs in the nearest social proximity. I steered myself away from all the endless — and yet unproductive — heated debates in online forums.
But the gravity of my revulsion toward society had rendered me empty. The frustration of finding something relevant led my life to the devoid of meaning. By withdrawing myself from society, I just ended up feeling more alone. At this point, I transformed to be the old version of myself, a young person swathed in an iconoclastic persona who couldn’t help herself to throw a coup on everything. She was the girl who painted a sturdy facade outward to hide her internal mess and burden. And her return meant something darker would reveal. She came to restore the fear I had long dismissed — that appeared to be intact. The fear that put my worthiness at stake.
My withdrawal from society appeared to be a fragment of a larger problem long-abided in my entire being. I might just set this failing by design. The reason I felt so disconnected from the world might not be about the aftermath of algorithm manipulation, but probably it derived from the emotional void I carried through. My trouble fitting into the social world was related to my lack of self-worth. I was grappling with the fear of exclusion for being unloved, shunned, and abandoned. And the way I responded to it was sort of debilitating.
I rationalized the fear of exclusion with an “anticipation”. When I felt less accepted in social circumstances, I would protect myself by shifting the framework otherwise. If they did not want to accept me, neither did I want to be a part of them. Alright, let me create my own space and comfort. For lack of a better phrase, I was ready to exclude myself from society first before society wanted to. It seemed to me that I set my own landmark for isolation instead of intimacy. The region of intimacy might be foreign to me, but I was fond of exploring and navigating myself around it. But, I didn’t know why on earth I deemed the world was so deficit to provide an opportunity for me to venture that journey.
That method of self-defense was way too protective, and to some extent, I believed I deserved to be prosecuted with experiencing the misery of loneliness throughout my life. I would go through the future life striving alone, by myself, because I thought I was a piece of shit and worthless. I was imprisoned by the narratives of self-punishment. To protect myself, I kept sabotaging my competence unconsciously. In hindsight, I was quite aware that my self-conception was still equivocal, it was loomed by the external approval.
Undeniably, we are conditioned to value ourselves based on extrinsic motivation, such as accomplishments, possessions, good grades, wealth, superiority to others, or high engagement social media posts. And with relationships — in whatever forms — we tend to feel defective and incomplete in the absence of a significant figure who’s willing to accept us. Without that, we always have reservations about our worth of existence. It is hard to ward off a self-hatred blow when the attributions of your self-worth are inextricably entrenched in external affirmations.
The logic of self-acceptance won’t make any sense if we are conditioned to place our worthiness in the reliance of others or the superficial values the modern world has imposed. That may be the case we always predispose to fall back into an existential crisis. We’re trained to designate our sense of self heavily on the external matter. Our idea about self-worth is so conditional.
Nonetheless, I did not think I was being completely fair to myself about my relationship with the world. Pretty much I did discredit myself to handle my own truth. I was so sick of being in the scheme of self-sabotaging to only protect my ego at all costs. This just outweighed all the joy I was capable to muster. Staying in that prison did not make any difference. How long the sentence should end? If I thought I deserved to be punished, it was also reasonable for me to come to terms with my own despair.
When we value our self-worth conditionally, our view of existence and being alive become so limited. We are just reliant on all the concepts, beliefs, and understanding that define a worth living life this modern capitalistic world has taught us relentlessly. Meanwhile, those lessons are the tyranny of black-and-white thinking about a happy or an unhappy life, a meaningful or a meaningless life. Why do we see our experience of being alive in a very closed-off sight?
I want to break free from all the concepts this world has shaped human perspective with. The concepts that has conditioned our self-worth. I want to stop positioning myself as a victim because of my inability to fit into the modern standard of a successful life. If we want to nurture unconditional self-worth, we need to see our experience of being alive beyond the story of surviving. In essence, it is. Our consciousness actually can overpass the preoccupation of success and failure, winning and losing, satisfied and unfulfilled. The qualities in our being are more dynamic, indefinable, and indescribable beyond the reach of all the two-dimensional metrics the world has compelled. Our experience of living is limitless.
Yet there is so much in life that remains unknown as the consequential meaning of the human story might always be a mystery. No one who ever outlives us comes back to the Earth and tells us where the endpoint of the arch of life is. If some people conveyed that they had experienced one reincarnation or many, we are not yet equipped with a compatible technology to prove the validity of that claim. But, I actually have already stopped looking for the final conclusion. Regardless of the many revelations that have transformed me, I will end up arriving at a place between knowing and not knowing, I am somehow always lost.
We are not bounded to moralize all the horrible things that happened to us or make meaning from a painful experience. We may wish our life is morphing gracefully from a beginning, a middle, to a resolution, but oftentimes, most rudely, life offers you no direct answer and no exact closure.
But there is a difference between terror and knowledge. I will respond to the uncertainties, this existential crisis or the next one, by being acutely aware of the remaining precious time I get. And I know I will do better than I anticipated because my brain has developed immunity from the experience of enduring the previous crisis. Possibly, I am going to take so many wrong turns that let myself down. But, brain immunity will protect myself from any ruptures and help to navigate me to the path I truly want to go.
