The Marker and Predictor
In her twenty years listening to thousands of stories from people struggling with addiction and mental illness, the psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke began to notice a pattern: those who continuously portray themselves as victims often remain addicted or mentally unwell. Oh, my friends introduced me to drugs, so it’s not my fault I can’t get off it now. Oh, when I was a kid my dad smoked around me all the time, so I can’t help but smoke too. Oh, my mom suffered depression since she was a kid, so I guess I’ve got the gene too. “They are too busy blaming others to get down to the business of their own recovery,” Lembke wrote in Dopamine Nation: Why our Addiction to Pleasure is Causing us Pain. The “victim narrative,” she explained, often makes us see ourselves as “victims of circumstance,” thus “deserving of compensation or reward for [our] suffering.” However, individuals who take responsibility for their predicaments, who emphasise “rigorous honesty with themselves by considering his or her character defects and how they have contributed to a problem,” and “confess to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrong,” often experience a powerful and transformative change. “I have become convinced,” Lembke wrote, “that the way we tell our personal stories is a marker and predictor” of our struggles, mental health and overall well-being.
Casting out the victim narrative from our lives and being rigorously honest with ourselves so that we can live the life we want to live and achieve the things we want to achieve—that’s the idea for today.
The Human I Became To Get It
Despite winning the gold at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics, the American snowboarder Shaun White did not make top three at the 2014 games in Sochi. Depressed, anxious and drowning in the sorrows of his poor performance, White said, he sat in his Malibu house, “crying, trying my hardest to feel so sad for myself that I didn’t win.” But in that moment, he experienced an epiphany: “What if I made this the best thing that’s ever happened to me?” Casting himself out of the victim narrative, he began to uncover the root of what went wrong at Sochi. In the qualifying rounds before the Olympic finals, White scored an impressive 95.75 — the highest of the night. “I had the winning cards,” he said, but somehow “I just couldn’t put them down when it mattered most.” Soon, he began to realise, it wasn’t a physical problem. It was mental. Figuring out what caused his mind to falter, he considered every aspect of his life with rigorous honesty: “I picked apart my personal life away from the snow…I picked apart things that were upsetting me: how I was portrayed online and in ads. Do I like who I’m working with? When was the last time I spoke to my brother? When was the last time I hung out with my friends? When was the last time I worked out? Those are the things I started to change in my life. It had nothing to do with snowboarding.” He changed the way he worked out, “not for the physical benefits, but because I know after a good workout, I’m happier.” He deleted most of the photos on his Instagram, “because I didn’t like all the old photos of me with the long hair.” He reconnected with his brother. He made time to hang out with his friends. He began to do things differently than what he had done before, eventually transforming himself into “a more complete, happier person.” Now, when he gets on the snowboard, White said, he’s not just “a guy” but “a happier guy.” At the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, White was living in a “déjà vu of the moment at the previous Olympics in Sochi.” Just like four years prior, at the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, it came down to the final run. “But this time, at the top of the pipe, I had the complete opposite feeling. I had this overwhelming confidence that I was about to win.” White scored 97.75 to win the gold. “And when I look back, I’m so proud of that gold medal, not necessarily because of the medal, but because of the human I became to get it. You know, a more well-rounded person. A happier person.”
No, Shut Up, I Don’t Want To Hear It
Sometimes, despite a desire to break out of the victim narrative, the environment in which one finds himself may hinder him from doing so. When Kobe Bryant first started out in the NBA, in the first two years, he wasn’t given much game time. His family and friends were constantly in his ear, Kobe said, “saying things like, ‘Oh, you should be starting.’ ‘Oh, you should be playing more.’ ‘Oh, the coaches don’t know what they’re doing,’” constantly blaming others instead of helping Kobe confront reality: that he just wasn’t good enough. “There’s a lot of noise,” Kobe said, “a lot of outside noise from family and friends and former coaches, filling your head with nonsense.” But you have to cleave yourself from that environment and mindset, you have to be rigorously honest with yourself. “You have to have strength,” Kobe said, “to be able to edit that and say, ‘No, shut up, I don’t want to hear it, this is on me…If I’m not playing, I need to get better at this, I need to get better at that.’” And for Kobe, “it was the challenge of getting to a place where it’s undeniable—you have to play me because I’m that good, I’m that efficient, I’m that strong at both ends of the floor.”
I Gradually Ceased To Be Afraid
In February 1844, at 8:30am, twenty-six year old Theodore Roosevelt, while at the Albany County Legislature, received a telegram on the birth of his daughter. Thirty hours later, his mother died from typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, his wife, Alice, died from an inflamed kidney triggered by childbirth. “The light has gone out of my life,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary that night. In an attempt to distract himself from his miseries, he plunged himself deeper into legislative work, which, instead of helping him find solace, worsened his depression. To escape the calamity of his life, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in Leadership In Turbulent Times, “Roosevelt headed into the Badlands, where he had purchased a ranch the previous year,” and with reckless abandon and an unstoppable frenzy, “punished himself with the hardest and most dangerous work of the cowboys, as if, through excitement and fear, he might retrieve the possibility of feeling alive once again.” For two years, Roosevelt rode his horse sixteen hours a day, hunted big game, gathered and sold cattle on the markets, “playing cowboy.” Eventually, his depression began to lift, and he had “emerged from his traumatic ordeal stronger in body and resurgent in spirit…[cultivating] courage as a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will-power… [and recasted] himself as a new kind of American man, a hybrid of the cultivated easterner and the hard bitten westerner.” He returned to the east no longer a victim of circumstance but as one who persevered, where he reconnected with the lady who would become his wife, and reentered political life. “The loss of his wife and mother on the same day,” Goodwin writes, “became more than a catastrophic landmark in Theodore Roosevelt’s personal life: The brutal twist of fate reshaped his philosophy of leadership…underscored the vulnerability, fragility, and mutability of all his endeavors.” “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first,” Roosevelt wrote, “but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid,” laying the foundations in the heart of a once-broken man to become the twenty-sixth president of the United States.
It’s Okay To Be Discouraged, But…
Believing the role was going to swing her career upside, instead, Lisa Kudrow was fired from the pilot of Frasier. With her sense of confidence shaken, she began to doubt herself and her abilities. With her state of mind at its lowest, it was challenging to find other acting jobs. Soon after, she was offered a minor, insignificant role as a nameless waitress on Mad About You. Considering it beneath her worth and talent, and with no prospects for career advancement, Kudrow’s agents advised her to pass on it. But she had to accept the role, she admitted, because she was in “no position to say no.” Just a week into filming, Mad About You producer Danny Jacobson was so impressed by Kudrow’s performance that he offered her another role as a quirky waitress named Ursula Buffay. In a life-changing turn of events, this role eventually led to Kudrow’s iconic portrayal of Phoebe Buffay on Friends, as the character of Ursula was carried over into the Friends universe as Phoebe’s twin sister. Reflecting on the low points of her career and how it shaped her into the person she is today, Kudrow said that while feeling sorry for your circumstances is only human, we cannot remain bogged-in for too long. “It’s okay to be discouraged,” she said, “but then you’ve got to pull yourself back up. You can’t stay down.” You can’t blame your present circumstances on what happened in the past. You can’t deflect responsibilities for your predicaments. You can’t always remain as the victim of your present circumstances, on the things that had happened to you, on the things beyond your immediate control. “That can’t be your mindset for too long, or otherwise, it won’t work out. That down and discouraged mindset will win.”
