They Told Me I Was a Victim. Believing It Almost Broke Me.

Even living under Venezuela's dictatorship, a victim mindset made my life worse.

You can fall in love with your suffering. Self-victimization absolves you of the responsibility to work through your hardships while permitting you to fixate on blaming others instead. Some of the most privileged people in the world today are building identities out of victimhood, attaching themselves to stories of oppression despite not having experienced that oppression themselves. I was one of these people, except I had every reason to see myself as a victim. Still, self-victimization only made my real suffering much worse.

I was born in Caracas, the capital city of my home country of Venezuela, to a 21-year-old woman who left me at the hospital. The nurses took care of me for a month and then a wonderful couple adopted me. My father was a white blue-eyed man of Hungarian descent, and my mother was a brown woman of mixed ancestry. Both my grandfathers were wealthy, one because he was a lawyer and the other because he was a businessman involved in politics. Yet that wasn’t enough to stave off my developing a victim mindset. Being left at the hospital when I was born instilled in me that I wasn't good enough to be loved. One of the many lies I would collect. I believed that the world hated me for who I was.

Venezuela is ruled by a socialist dictatorship. When I was three, my mom overheard me and a classmate playing with our dolls. We said, "Don't go to the protest! They will kill you!" So needless to say, we were aware of the consequences of speaking against the regime. But if you're from a wealthy background like I am, so long as you keep quiet about your dislike for the government, the dictatorship doesn't hit you too hard. For example, when everyone else had to make a 3-day queue to get gasoline or when milk, flour, sugar, and other supplies disappeared entirely from store shelves, we had the money to buy them all at a higher price. I felt guilty about this immense privilege; why did I get to have a wonderful life while others were dying?

As a kid, I was very curious and had issues understanding social cues. I was honest to a fault (I’d tell everyone I was the one who farted if they asked), and I loved talking for hours about my current obsession, usually far removed from my peers' interests. I ended up as the "weird kid,” admired by my teachers because I was gifted, but cast aside by my classmates.

When everyone said they wanted to be a princess or a mom, I said I wanted to become a wild animal tamer and have a tiger and an eagle as best friends. Being bullied was inevitable.

I attended an all-girls private Catholic school—one of the most expensive in the country. In class, I kept asking questions until they got so complex that I was forbidden from asking any more to avoid confusing the other girls. A teacher once got angry at me because I asked what made warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals different; she told me she wasn't the Encyclopedia 300 and didn't know. One teacher tried to convince me I was inventing animals until I showed them to her in a science book.

My father was my best friend through all of this. He loved animals, and he treated me like a princess. Yet he also treated me just like he did his sons; I would be thrown around in the air, shown snakes, and was never forced to be feminine. When I asked him what Aikido was–a Japanese martial art–he showed me by asking me to punch him and then throwing me on the ground. My mother wanted a little princess, but my dad told her they had a warrior princess. When I started to question our religion at 7 years old, he welcomed that. I asked him, "If I stop being Catholic, would that make me a bad person?" He smiled and told me, "My mom is an Atheist, my dad a Jew, and you can be anything you want as long as you're kind.” He was my hero and the only member of my family who didn't mind my quirky personality.

When I was 10, my father died suddenly. As I cried in the schoolyard, a teacher told me not to be so dramatic. I stopped crying from then on, but the pain didn’t leave with it. Shortly after, I developed fibromyalgia, which makes you feel pain from stimuli that aren’t normally painful; a gentle tap on my arm can feel like a punch. The pain moves from 5 to 9 on a 1 to 10 scale, but it's never 0. Moving became a struggle because my joints and muscles always hurt. Sometimes the pain and fatigue even took me to the ER. My suffering began making me resentful of those who seemed to have it easier.

At the time I was practicing karate, and one of the other few women in the class was a gorgeous girl I came to admire. She was strong, stylish, and I wanted to be close to her. I realized I wanted to have her as my girlfriend—I hadn’t known you could feel that way about someone of the same sex. We started spending a lot of time together and once, at her house, we kissed. I was so excited that I ran back home to tell my mom. She broke down crying, saying God had made a mistake with me. My grandmother told me I was possessed by the devil.

All the pain, loneliness, and pent-up anger found an outlet when I discovered social justice activism. I became an arrogant social justice warrior who blamed my problems on the bigotry and ignorance of others.

I joined atheist communities online that gave me a sense of righteous fury at those in my real life telling me all my problems would be solved if I just prayed enough, but offered no answer for what would actually solve my problems. Though I never became a Communist because in rejecting my society, I also rejected Chavez and his socialism, I became a raging feminist. All the while, I was severely depressed. The more I read how everyone in the world hated LGBT people, women, disabled people, and everything that made me who I was, the more I wanted to kill myself. I fought with my mom constantly, calling her sexist, racist, classist, ableist, and more.

But the first lesson that started to shift the mindset that was harming me came from the very person my ideology told me to demonize.

When I was in my fifth year of High School, I met the first religion teacher I became friends with. He showed us a scene from God’s Not Dead. Referencing the event at the center of the film’s plot, I snapped at him, "Are you going to force me to sign a paper that says I believe in God? Because I don't. And you're not going to make me.” He smiled sweetly and shook his head, "Oh, you're an Atheist? They are my best students! No one pays attention to me like they do. It's lovely to meet you.” We had the best philosophical conversations after that. One day he told me, "Those who claim to be the most open-minded tend to be the most close-minded." I realized that included me. I had demonized all religious people, yet he acted angelic towards me.

One of the last things he told me before I graduated was, "I hope to have a kid just like you.” He made me realize that by hating entire groups, I had been missing the opportunity to interact with angels like him. It was at this moment that my eyes finally opened. Yes, I was a black sheep, and due to my nature, I was hurt by my bullies, my family, and many from my religious community. but I was also loved deeply by my mother, who kept trying to open her mind and change her viewpoints to get closer to me, and loved by plenty of religious people who didn't care that I was different.

I was rejected by some and accepted by others—that's not just injustice, it’s life.

This realization freed me to start growing. While there was a lot about my life I couldn’t change, there was still plenty in my control. Recognizing this showed me that proper self-love didn’t mean believing "I'm perfect just as I am,” because I wasn't. I had to handle my hypersensitivity better. Yes, my country indeed has a lot of colorism, homophobia, sexism, classism, and xenophobia, but that wouldn’t be fixed by me becoming just as hateful. If I wanted to make a change, I had to avoid becoming the monster I was fighting. I left the toxic communities I had joined online, stopped self-harming, started working out, and began following center and center-right content creators to challenge my worldview. I learned to understand others and why they might think differently.

Thanks to this, my mom and I were able to develop a close relationship. I realized she isn’t perfect either, and that’s ok—she gave everything to be the best mom she could be. As soon as I stopped antagonizing her, she started to open her mind. She accepted my religious beliefs, my sexuality, and she's learning to accept my disability as well. I couldn't be more grateful to have her in my life.

Attending university put me face-to-face with social justice warriors. No longer separated by a screen, their pathological behavior became more clear. A trans-man told me he hated all men, despite him transitioning to be one. A girl said she hoped I’d get raped after I told her that men also deserve shelters to protect them from abusive family members or partners. These social justice warriors harbored the same hatred that I once did.

Social issues can't be solved with a victim mentality and hatred.

People in my country are starving and being told "the rich white man is to blame" isn't feeding them. Attacking the rich and expropriating their wealth to give out free food didn't solve anything in the long run—it made people dependent on the government and then led to shortages once the wealth ran out. Similarly, I recognize now that atheists’ anger at religious people won't solve the problem of religious extremism.

I'm now 25 years old. I’ve been in a beautiful relationship for almost 7 years, I'm a martial arts disciple in a martial arts family I adore, and I write a newsletter called Nuanced Free Souls. I'm thriving, yet I'm still a black sheep.

I’m too capitalist for my progressive friends and too socially liberal for conservatives. I get called a Nazi and a misogynist by progressives while I get called a degenerate by conservatives. But now I understand how anger and pain once drove me to attack the people I disagreed with.

I'm brown, female, neurodivergent, chronically ill, bisexual, a religious minority, and live under an oppressive regime. I have every reason to see myself as a victim, but I don’t. I see myself as a warrior—not a social justice warrior, but a nuanced and free warrior—the warrior my father saw in me. Instead of victimhood, I choose freedom: the freedom to determine my values, choose my path, and take responsibility for the consequences.

I might only be a random Venezuelan you'll never meet, but I want to share the lessons I’ve learned to help you face your challenges too. As black sheep, we have to stick together.