My year as a victim.

This feels grotesque to admit, but sometimes being a victim feels really fucking good.

In case you’re new here: back in 2024, my then-husband had an affair that completely detonated the life we’d built together over the course of our thirteen-year relationship. The affair itself was fairly scandal-laden—from the age gap between him and his affair partner, to having me fly across the world to Japan while he was actively cheating on me, to eventually disappearing from our shared life entirely and leaving me alone to sort through the rubble.

Calling it “a harrowing time” would be laughably insufficient. It was a molecule-rearranging event. My life now is practically unrecognizable from the life I lived less than two years ago. Which, to be fair, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just still completely mind-boggling.

Back then, when every day felt like survival mode, I clung tightly to one simple fact: I was the victim in this story.

While my brain replayed the events on a relentless loop—the weeks leading up to it, the moment I lost my mind in a hotel room in Ginza, the lonely flight back home across the world—I found comfort in knowing I had done nothing wrong. I didn’t deserve this. I had simply been wronged.

I never consciously decided to “play the victim.” But in those early days, I needed to be one.

I absorbed sympathy like oxygen. I commiserated hard with the people who sighed heavily before speaking to me, carefully choosing their words around me like I was something fragile and injured. It felt strangely good to be handled gently. Normally, I struggle to accept help. Food, favors, emotional support—those things usually make me uncomfortable. But during that time, I relied on my support system without guilt. It felt like the one moment in my life where accepting care without reciprocation was not only allowed, but expected.

And then, when the initial shock began to wear off and I started down the long, ugly road of rebuilding my life, I leaned even harder into my righteousness. I did it here, at times, on my Substack. And when I did, I was met with support. Soon I was like one of those lab rats who figured out how to push a button to get cheese.

Because when you’re lying awake alone in your first apartment without your spouse, your brain starts searching for soft places to land. And there is something deeply comforting about victimhood.

Another person’s actions are outside your control. In the chaos and complexity of divorce, it felt almost luxurious to reduce things down to black and white thinking, just as a treat. When the dread in my chest became unbearable, when the depression wrapped itself around my throat, I could soothe myself with one simple truth:

I am good, and my ex-husband is bad.

Nuance not required.

And sometimes that was enough to let me sleep for a few hours. But as the weeks turned into months, and the anniversery of our splintering loomed, I started having other troubling thoughts: am I making being the victim into my entire personality?

I recently read this essay called “The Addictive High of Being a Victim” and it perfectly articulated something I’d been circling around for months:

Here’s how it usually starts: something genuinely unfair happens to you. Maybe your boss passes you over for a promotion. Maybe a friend betrays your trust. Maybe life just delivers one of its random sucker punches.

You have a choice in how to frame this experience. You could see it as a complex situation with multiple factors, some within your control and some not. You could focus on what you can learn or how you can respond.

But there’s another option, and it’s much more appealing: you can make yourself the hero of a tragedy.

Suddenly, you’re not just someone who experienced something unfortunate. You’re someone special. Someone who suffers more beautifully than others. Someone whose pain means something. Someone whose story matters because of how much you’ve endured.

That’s the seductive part of victimhood: healing seems simpler when you’re the victim because victims don’t have to change. Growth belongs to everyone else.

And to be clear, a few things can simultaneously be true here: my ex should never have cheated on me. I don’t forgive him. I was absolutely the victim of his negligence, dishonesty, and destructive decision-making.

But it’s dangerous to build your permanent residence on Victim Street.

Because victimhood requires very little self-reflection. Little accountability. Little internal examination. Once you decide you’re a victim, you get to become one everywhere. Every argument with a friend becomes betrayal. Every disappointment at work becomes injustice. Every inconvenience becomes evidence that the world is conspiring against you personally.

Your victim status makes you untouchable. Too wounded to critique. Too fragile to confront.

For months after my breakup, I happily existed as a baby bird fallen from the nest. And I carried that into dating. I expected everyone around me to accommodate my heartbreak and trauma. Since my divorce had been thrust upon me without my consent, it now felt like everyone else’s responsibility to help carry it. They needed to avoid triggering me. They needed to help me heal. They needed to make me whole again.

And how?

By handling conflict my way. By deferring to my worldview. By constantly reaffirming the one foundational truth I desperately needed upheld: I am an innocent victim who was destroyed by a horrible monster.

But if you’re genuinely interested in healing, eventually you have to move out of Victim Street.

At some point in every person’s healing journey, I think there’s a choice to make: do you want being victimized to become your identity, or do you want it to become something that simply happened to you?

About six months after my breakup, I started feeling exhausted by my own victimhood. I noticed people no longer associated me with my work, or my personality, or the things I cared about. I had become synonymous with my divorce.

It didn’t help that if you Googled me, I was still primarily identified as my ex-husband’s former wife. Even his cyber ghost was harassing me! I, again, a victim of this man!

When I was married to him, I somewhat accepted that I existed in his shadow. But I realized I was unwilling to spend the rest of my life existing in the shadow of my own devastation. I was ready to move on.

I also had to confront another uncomfortable truth: if I ever wanted to love again—really love again—I wanted to do it as myself, not as the permanently wounded version of myself.

Of course what happened to me matters. It’s important context. But it doesn’t need to become the entire story. It can simply be exposition. A preamble. An FYI alongside all the other things that shaped me: my first heartbreak, my most humiliating childhood memory, the years I spent becoming who I am.

Untangling yourself from a victim complex is messy work. And when I’m triggered, I still want to run right back to Victim Street.

I want someone to pick me up gently and return me to the safety of my nest. I want to be tucked under someone’s wing while it rains. I want to be comforted and fed regurgitated worms directly to the back of my throat.

But I’m trying to do something much harder.

Which means accepting the horrifying possibility that maybe…….. I was not perfect in my marriage. God I hope my ex isn’t reading this.

Again: this is not me justifying my ex’s behavior. But for a long time, I relied heavily on the narrative that I had been the perfect wife and he simply squandered all that perfection to go fuck some naïve young actor. Maybe, like most things in life, it was more complex than that.

And maybe there’s a version of the story where that feels emotionally satisfying. But when I step down from the pedestal and look at things at eye level, there was probably more rot in the marriage than I wanted to see. More ways I contributed to our disconnection than I initially allowed myself to examine. Things I wish my ex-husband would have told me about instead of hiding them away.

And if I’m ever going to open my heart again, I need to understand those things. I need to know where I failed, what I could have done better, and how my own behaviors may have eroded intimacy over time.

Hopefully next time, I’ll be with someone capable of having those conversations before the entire structure collapses.

But moving beyond victimhood has also given me something invaluable.

Once you finally stand the fuck back up, you regain access to your own agency. Your worth. Your capability. Your capacity. You become responsible for your future again. You learn what you deserve. You learn what still needs healing. You learn where your boundaries are. You learn what you’re capable of surviving.

But in order to access those things, you eventually have to remove the protective cloak of your suffering. And without it, you may feel exposed. Less special. Less shiny. Without your trauma, you may simply just become boring. And that’s fine!

I still struggle to comprehend the cruelty of my husband’s affair and eventual discard. But continuing to define myself as his victim gives him more power over me than I’m willing to surrender. Because when you’re no longer the wounded bird, nobody is coming to place you gently back in the nest.

You have to learn how to fly yourself.

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