Take the victim hat off

Don't be the victim. Even if you are a victim, don't accept to play the role of victim. Or at least, don't be one for long.  While there are some advantages to allowing yourself to be the victim, in the long term there is one indisputable disadvantage:


Helplessness.


Helplessness is a deplorable and harmful quality.  A sense of helplessness is the seed of a lot of bad choices (while simultaneously believing there was no choice).  What was I supposed to... I can't... You made me... Well, that's just how I feel... No... No... No... I didn't mean... It just that always...


Helplessness is not going to help you to get the good stuff out of life.  Not in the slightest (and yes, it is your job to get the goods out of life). When engaged with being the victim, a certain power is relinquished.  The power to change your outcome; change how you choose to react.  And I get that sometimes it is easier to surrender to victim-hood than try to reconcile the mucky world we live in and the darkness of the human heart with our tv and moral expectations of how it should have been. Easier but not a better way to live.


A lot of workplaces are stressful. Many relationships end badly.  People do shitty things. Sometimes people do shitty things to you (more often with a self-involved attempt to meet their own needs and insecurities without considering the unintended consequences rather than malicious intent). The best thing for you to do is to enable an ability to enjoy life again anyway; despite the crap.  In order to do that, you have to decide you don't want to be the victim any more. 


If what has happened to you is so colossally bad you cannot get past it (which is not really what I'm talking about* but fair enough, we know all the 6 o'clock horror stories), then choose what you will be a victim about and when, and don't allow the role to seep into your good relationships or the attitude with which you approach the world. You need to compartmentalise the fuck out of that victim hat.


If a label doesn't make you happy or at least put you on the road to happy, don't wear it.

We have all been victims to varying degrees. We are not all victims. You don't have to be one any more if you don't want to be.

*Reminder: This is advice for only people who want it. And this is the about victims of everyday work politics, irritating neighbours, bad luck, ancient history and parking enforcement officers. I have no qualifications to advise on the serious stuff.

You are not lost

You're not lost if you don't care where you are.

My mother said this umpteen times when I was growing up.  And now that I find myself living on the other side of the globe in a town I had not even heard of 12 months before embarking on a life here, it makes me smile.

My mother is slightly heartbroken that I broke her only commandment ("Do not get married and have my grandchildren on the other side of the world."). And I am sure she didn't mean for me to interpret her throw-away, flippant idiom quite like this.

But hey!

I had a vision for my life. Lots of people have goals.  Particularly for before they turn 30. I had one:

1. To live in a place where I do not have to leave the building to do laundry.

I had a vague vision of living in a large city, with a very active social life that was based on some bizarre expectations and values as dictated by a combination of "Sex and the City", Lonely Planet and "Bridget Jones' Diary"- the books, not the movie. The best laid plans, eh?

As you can imagine, I was alarmed on my 30th to find myself married, in smalltown 'burbs, with a baby, a step-son and a house that required somebody (me?!? surely not) to weed the gutters. I did not accept my fate gracefully. It was a dark few months and I was lost.

Without going into the details of the drama, I've made peace with my fairly conventional life.

I know this is a phase. It will not last.  The good of it and the bad of it will be unrecognisable in a year or two or five.  So, I am enjoying my visit to the suburban jungle before I go off traipsing around Morocco and Turkey and Bahrain and Paris again.

Just because you aren't where planned, doesn't mean you're lost.