Resist the urge to identify with your downfall
You’ve been cancelled, you’ve been shamed, you’ve been publicly disgraced. The trauma is real and significant and the life you led prior to all of this feels like it is one the verge of being snuffed out. After the initial fallout you will begin to learn how to breath again, to be alive but there often remains a hole in your identity.
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The spotlight effect makes you believe that everybody else sees you as the “person who went through the thing”. Maybe it was a very public breakup or firing, maybe you were accused of something illegal or unethical but one way or another you have been associated with something socially reprehensible and it is starting to become a part of your persona.
Your first reaction is likely to include an attempt to recover your reputation and reclaim your innocence. You think, surely if others can see your side and the nuances of the situation they will view you with more grace than disdain. You plead for anyone to hear your case but you find out quickly that few want to have that conversation. People’s minds have been made up and they expect you to deny culpability anyway so your attempt to look innocent falls flat. No matter how false or unfair the accusations are against you they will leave a long lasting stain that you will need to learn to live with.
As you come to terms with the fact that you can’t reclaim innocence so easily you might be tempted to lean into another identity shaping aspect of this nightmare. We now think, “if I can’t be innocent then maybe I can be pitiful.” Of course we will not literally and consciously wish to be pitiful but many of us, when we realize that we cannot win, use self-deprecation and the pity of others to gain status from losing. We start to recognize the sympathy we can garner from the people who have seen us go through hell and are just glad that it wasn’t them. It is tempting to use and even embellish the damage done so that people will at least acknowledge that what we have gone through is difficult and unfair.
If people no longer think we’re great there is a psychological consolation prize in the form of their feeling sorry for us. It’s a low status position but at least it’s not at the very bottom. In fact, there is special status for the victim. What the victim lacks in prestige he makes up for it in sympathy.
Victimhood cleanses us from responsibility as the narrative shifts from what we did to how bad we have it and how unfair the meanies are. In the depths of hell one can be easily persuaded to seek and accept the balm of sympathy.
We are so afraid to identify with our mistakes that we are seduced by the identification with our lowly state. Our locus of control is shifted to the external, which is to say that we lose the faith that anything we do or say matters. We have no autonomy. We think the world is out to get us and there is nothing we can do about it. We start to prefer the relief of people feeling bad for us over the freedom of responsibility. We also become a magnet for other people who blame everyone and everything else for their problems, further solidifying our toxic mindset. We even begin to resent people who have anything positive or encouraging to say to us. How dare they offer suggestions or support instead of affirming that I’ve just been handed a unlucky lot. How dare they suggest that I could get out of this! Don’t they know I’ve tried absolutely everything and it didn’t work! Have they no sympathy?
"Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them."
Brianna West
Identifying with your downfall leads to delegating your recovery into the hands of someone else, often no one in particular.
This is not a path to long term thriving.
Recognizing that you’ve gone through something difficult is one thing but a reliable indicator that you are truly moving beyond your trauma is when you can honestly tell the story of your social demise in a way that is humorous and/or dismissive.
When Margaret Atwood wrote an open letter in criticism of UBC’s firing of Creative Writing Professor Scott Galloway she received a lot of backlash from her largely feminist and left-leaning fandom. After many fans unironically attempted to get Atwood cancelled instead of garnering sympathy (which she could have easily done) she expressed confidence in her opinions and her position. She was no employed so she couldn’t be fired. Over her career she has faced numerous attempts of censorship and indignation and knows not to feed it with even a sliver of victimhood or the seeking of sympathy. She rose above her critics, reiterated her support for due process (she wasn’t even defending Galloway himself rather the instinct to fire people for being accused not for being guilty), and she defiantly proclaimed her superiority by subtly suggesting that no one should bother trying to cancel her because she is essentially immune to it. Maybe there are a few fans who have refused to support her work but most will forget her transgressions and she will still go down as one of the greats of our time.
Atwood made her point, she stuck to her principles, demonstrated her strength and moved on. This the way.
Start wrestling with how you can avoid the temptation to identify with your downfall. Maybe instead of seeking sympathy you can foster sympathy for those who have had it worse than you. Sometimes a bit of perspective can help you realize that as bad as it turned out for you it could have been much worse and thank the stars above that it wasn’t.
The next time someone asks you how you’re doing consider how to be both honest and optimistic in your answer. Even if you haven’t “fully recovered” try to answer with what is going well these days (there is definitely something in your life that is going ok). You might be tempted to focus on your sad state of affairs like how you’re still unemployed and single but the person asking probably already knows that. Catch them off guard by telling them how amazing the sunset was one your walk last night or how mind-blowing the last novel you read was. Whatever you can come up with, install in them that you are not pathetic and that you are on your way up. This is not “fake it until you make it” but it’s refuses to manipulate pity.
Anyway you can, take responsibility for where you are at and it will increase the likelihood of gaining or regaining eventual allies. It will also be a further step in convincing yourself that you indeed have something to offer the world and that you still maintain control of a large portion of your life. You aren’t in control of the greater world around you but the more you foster your internal locus of control, the idea that you are a self-determined creature that is not doomed to the whims and waves of the world, you become more mature, developed and resistant to the forces that tried to take you down.
You are not the worst thing that has happened to you. It is and always will be a part of your story but the sooner you take responsibility for it all the sooner you can move into a state of self-determination which trumps the temporary appeal of gaining sympathy. As you slowly regain status it will be more genuine and sustaining. Any status that is gained by manipulation will not last, instead the path of responsibility, albeit slower, leads to authentic gains in esteem but in the self and peer variety.