Long Jump

You know when you’re playing the victim or at least feeling sorry for yourself, un-constructively.  No-one is going to tell you unless a friend is willing to risk the gun fire that will come their way. I’m not talking about situations where you are quite literally a victim, I’m not taking that away from what it is. But we all know the difference. We know when we feel sorry for ourselves and we’re stuck in a cycle of trying to find validation for why we might feel so low. We seek it out from friends, we present our stories to them in a way that means they’ll say the thing we want them to. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. It feels terrible when they do, it feels terrible when they don’t. We know we’re missing the bit of the line that makes this feel resolved within ourselves. But we have no idea where to find it so we keep going round the circle and just long jump over that part. My memory of things often gets so clouded by how I feel presently, I lose track of what actually happened. Admitting we’re playing the victim means we have to face decisions that we’ve made, whether we back them or not. Choices that we’ve made, responsibility that we had. It alleviates the complexity of life which is so often too hard to grasp. It’s hard to accept multiple complex things at once or to just simply say, this doesn’t work for reasons outside of your control, it’s much easier to passively sit in the pain because understanding that we made choices to put ourselves there feels unforgivable. We forget why we made those decisions in the first place. Being responsible for something is harder than not. But it might be vital in terms of going forward otherwise you’ll just be going round and round the gappy circular running track instead of leaving the stadium and heading out into the big wide world.