Professional Victims

I'm a firm believer in karma.  What goes around, comes around.

I think that I'm getting mine now, and it really kind of sucks.

When I was younger, a lot younger, I was rather histrionic.  I played the victim card at every opportunity.  Why, I don't know.  I have my own opinions, but those would require that I reveal more personal information that I'm prepared to share, so we'll just say that there were some mitigating circumstances.

When I grew up, I stopped seeing everything as negative.  I quit making out that everyone was doing (or had done) me wrong, and I realized that perpetual victimhood was not condusive for a happy and content life.  I just stopped...and, as sometimes happens, I found myself becoming very irritated with people who displayed the same personality traits as I used to display.  In much the same way a former smoker becomes a rabid anti-smoker after they quit, so was I a staunch opponent of people who manipulated the truth to suit their own perceived status of the perpetual victim.

My behaviour in my younger days has come back to bite me in the ass.  There are a few people around me at the moment who believe themselves to be masters of this 'playing the victim' game.  They find fault with any and everything I say and do; they put words in my mouth and feelings in my heart to further their cause as the ones being done wrong.  When they don't have any facts to manipulate, when they've stretched the truth as far as it will possibly go, they will (and have) fabricated things.  Words that have never been spoken, scenes that never took place are being conjured up and used to make these people look....put upon.  Wronged.  Victims.

The thing is, I should have seen this coming.  I watched from the sidelines in the past as they did this with other people.  I observed them and their melodrama, and I never spoke up.  I thought that they would get over it, that they wouldn't do it to me, that they were just doing it because they felt insecure at the time and needed to feel important and like they belonged. 

I was a fucking idiot.  Not for keeping my silence, but for letting circumstances arise that gave these people fuel.  For giving them fodder.

Now me and mine have fallen...hehehe....'victim' to this foul manipulation.  I let myself get dragged in, and I made the mistake of arguing with them.  See, you can't argue with a professional victim.  Every and anything you say is recorded and twisted around, turned on you and used against you.  The best thing you can do is be silent.  Shut your mouth.  Say nothing.  Yes, they can use the silence against you, but....it's easy to twist words and actions.  It's hard to make a mountain out of a molehill of silence.

So, silence it is.  Silence it will be.  Let them make what they will of that....