Break with the Past

As I wrote in an earlier post, The True Cause Of Cruelty, for me seventh grade was a disaster. I was persecuted by anti-Semites and so traumatized that my parents endured owning two houses at once for six months in order to get me into a new school. I left seventh grade mistrustful, fearful, and socially isolated, feeling as if I'd hidden my true self for so long in order to minimize the risk of persecution that I'd lost track of it entirely.

In subsequent years, I'd occasionally look back and wonder how the experience had scarred me, figuring vaguely that what didn't kill me made me stronger, but never really delving too deeply into the fear that still remained in the pit of my stomach whenever I'd be thrust into new situations.

Then in my first year of medical school I began practicing Buddhism. I was told, among other things, that through practicing it one could change one's past, present, and future. Present and future I could understand—but past? I had no real understanding how I could change something that had already occurred.

And then one day while chanting about my seventh grade experience, curious to see if the practice would provide me any insight into what had happened, I had an epiphany: the true reason I'd been made a victim as I had was because I'd let it happen. Whenever I'd perceived myself to be in danger of being attacked my strategy had been to ingratiate myself with my would-be attacker in any way I could. I'd allow myself to be teased, disdained, embarrassed, or humiliated as long as I believed it would prevent me from being hurt. Not once did I ever fight back.

In a flash, I saw this pattern stretch backward from that moment to touch my failed relationship with my first girlfriend, then arc through my seventh grade experience, and finally extend into the farthest recesses of my earliest childhood. Making myself into a victim had been a strategy I'd used throughout my life, I realized, for many reasons: to get attention; to convince...