You're not sick

Self-victimization is ruining the world, and how to fix it

If you’ve seen my posts on 𝕏, I am very critical of “self-victimization” culture. It is something I am seeing a lot in the younger generation - a consistent pattern of behavior that’s both attention seeking and responsibility avoiding - using external reasons exclusively for personal failures, acting powerless and shifting all the blame to “the system” or some other excuse. It’s self-perpetuating, because not holding yourself responsible for your actions and choices ensures that you won’t do anything to improve your situation, and today’s society is full of enablers who perpetuate this behavior instead of challenge it.

The main reason I am so critical is I lived it, and it was ruining my life and hurting those who cared about me. It was a selfish and weak place to be. And so when I see it in others, it is very easy to recognize - I completley understand the mindset, and our minds can be our own worst enemies - but I don’t think we should continue validating it. It’s bad. It’s bad for individuals and it’s bad for society. And we need to stop enabling it and try to get people to break out of it.

So I’d like to tell my story here and how I got into it and how I broke out of it, in hopes that it might help someone else recognize this in themselves or those they care about going through the same thing.

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In high school, I felt like I was doing everything you’re supposed to be doing - I did well on my SATs, I had nearly straight-A’s (except that one B from calculus, I’m still mad at you Mr. Coleman!), I played sports and did “key club” and tutored and tried to set myself up for future success in the most generic way you’re “supposed to” in order to prepare for college.

My parents divorced while I was in middle school and I lived with my mom, and as the youngest child I was the only one left at the house. For the most part, I didn’t have much parenting - my mom worked evenings so I was pretty much home alone most of the time, and my house was more or less a hangout area for my friend group since no one was there. For a teenager, this was a pretty ideal setup!

But a little more than halfway through my senior year, as I was applying to different colleges, I started to feel sick. It was a weird general malaise - there weren’t any obvious symptoms pointing to anything, I just started to felt lethargic, would get headaches, had a weird side pain and had trouble eating. And it started spiraling. Because eating would make me feel sick, I didn’t eat much and began to lose quite a bit of weight. My mom became very worried about my health and took me to all her doctors, who gave me all kinds of tests and scans. One in particular I remember was a full body scan where I had to drink a bunch of different dyes. After all the scans, I was completley sick to my stomach and spent the night in the bathroom. I wouldn’t recommend it.

And nothing was found. My friends and my girlfriend were very worried, and my mom was beside herself. I kept spiraling, doing less, eating less, trying to sleeping more, but I would frequently wake up in cold sweats throughout the night. I spent way too much time on the internet reading all sorts of potential reasons for the symptoms, which the internet pretty much always told me was cancer, and I became convinced I had some crazy rare illness that the doctors just couldnt find.

One day, I asked my mom if instead of going to college, I could stay home for a year and instead focus on my health, which she was happy to accommodate. But something unintuitive happened - just from that conversation… I temporarily felt a lot better.

But not because I was focusing on my health.

Focusing on my health was part the illness.

The root cause of all my symptoms? My own mind. Anxiety. Hypochondria. I didn’t want to face the world. I needed an excuse. And my body made one for me. That’s all it was. But I didn’t know that yet.

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At that point, I wasn’t out of the weeds. For the summer after my senior year, I would oscillate between feeling better and feeling sick again. I would tell people I wanted a job, and my girlfriend basically set one up for me where she used to work, but I canceled on the interview because I “felt sick” which was pretty understandably frustrating for her. I felt lame enough for not going to college that I decided to attend community college after the summer, but I ended up dropping out after the first week because I kept getting panic attacks in class (I didn’t know they were panic attacks though, my heart would just start beating really fast and I thought I was having a heard attack, and would leave).

I kept seeing different doctors but tests never showed anything that explained the symptoms. I took various medicines - including one that had the warning “this will dangerously lower dopamine,” but I didn’t know what that meant except I would get really tired if I took it.

In the meantime, my not-yet stepdad moved in, and would often get upset with me for being lazy and entitled - which to be fair to him, I was pretty lazy and entitled. This kept escalating, though, and eventually after he threatened to “kick my ass” I decided that this environment wasn’t healthy to my “recovery” and that I should move out. I ended up staying with my dad and stepmom for the interim.

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My parents are very different in how they handle things. While my parents are both very kind, my mom is a worrier and gets very emotionally wrapped up in things, my dad is much more stoic, more of a “tough love” pragmatist. The effect that had on my emotional state was quite unexpected.

I started community college again at a different school close to my dad’s, and was doing a little bit better managing things, but one morning I had a weird new symptom - a rash on my neck - and started getting hysterical about it. I called the nurse hotline and she said I needed to come in and I went to my dad to tell him I needed to borrow his extra truck to go to the emergency room.

His response was not what I was used to. My mom would usually panic, drop everything, and take me herself to the emergency room right then and there. My dad just looked at me quizzically, looked at the rash, a bit dumbfounded with the juxtaposition between my agitation and the actual symptoms. “That just looks like razor burn?” He inquired - which it was, I had just shaved with a new razor, but hadn’t put that together yet.

I continued my hysterics, the nurse said I had to go now and it could be from meningitis because of my headache and the rush and blah blah blah blah. My dad approached me, paused, put his hands on my shoulders, and calmly said 4 words that stick with me to this day:

“Billy, you’re not sick.”

I was finally able to calm down.

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It took me a long time to truly understand what was happening with me. That I was never actually sick, I was just scared. My life was previously comfortable - I lived in the same house all my life, I went to school with all my same friends, everything was on rails more or less. But the new chapter was scary. College was scary. The idea of working was scary. The “real world” was scary. I didn’t know if I could do it. So being sick was an excuse. A way to explain to “the world” that, while I could totally face everything obviously, this “illness” is preventing me from doing that. And that’s why I’m falling behind my peers. Something out of my control. Not the reality that I was doing it to myself, albeit unconsciously.

My mom did the best she could, and I do appreciate how much she cared, but objectively and unintuitively her method of compassion actually made things worse for my mental state at the time. I didn’t need someone to get stressed and anxious with me, escalate it to doctors who were incentivized to do invasive tests, and validate my excuses. I needed someone that understood what I didn’t.

That I wasn’t sick. That I was just scared.

And eventually, I found that it was overblown. It wasn’t that scary after all.

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For me, the moral of the story is just that we have a lot more power than we think we do - both internally and externally. We can put ourselves in a mental prison and seek out only things that validate our weakness. And I believe that is happening at a macro level right now with many parts of society. There are many who benefit from validating the weakness of others. But it doesn’t help. It makes everything worse.

I think the real truth is, we all have the ability to rewrite our own narratives. We all have hard times, but we aren’t victims - we are people who can overcome challenges and gain perspective and strength. That true compassion comes in the form of helping someone achieve their potential, rather than just treating the symptoms of self-destructive behavior.

You’re not sick, society. You just need a change in perspective, and a little bit of tough love.