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.