Everyone's the Victim, Nobody's Wrong

It's 10:40 PM on this particularly cold Saturday night. I'm trying to fall asleep but my oversabi brain decided to start analyzing scenarios that happened years ago. You know that thing where your mind suddenly replays a conversation from 2021 and you're lying there in the dark thinking, "Wait, was I actually the problem in that situation?"

That's where I am right now. And the more I think about it, the more I realize there's a pattern I keep seeing, not just in my own life but everywhere online. Something strange is happening with our generation, and I can't be the only one who's noticed it.

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram long enough and you'll see it: everyone has a special heart. Everyone is too good for the people around them. Everyone is the victim in every story they tell. In relationships, in friendships, in every conflict that unfolds, there's always an angel and a villain. And somehow, the person holding the camera is always the angel. The person making the post is always the victim.

I'm lying here thinking about a friendship I lost two years ago. For the longest time, I told myself and anyone who would listen that she was the problem. She stopped replying to my messages. She started acting distant. She changed. And I was the one who tried, who reached out, who cared. That was my story, clean and simple. I was the good friend. She was the one who gave up.

But tonight, in this quiet room with just my thoughts and the hum of the ceiling fan, I'm remembering things I conveniently left out of that story. Like how I used to cancel plans with her whenever something "better" came up. How I only really checked in when I needed something. How I talked about my problems for hours but somehow never had time to listen to hers. How I made her feel small in front of other people because it got laughs and I liked being the funny one.

The version I told everyone was true. She did stop replying. She did become distant. But the version I didn't tell was also true. I gave her every reason to.

I'm not saying people don't get hurt. I'm not saying there aren't real victims of real harm. But what I am saying is that we've created a culture where accountability has become optional, where admitting fault feels like weakness, where every story we tell positions us as blameless and everyone else as the problem.

Think about it. When was the last time you saw someone post about how they messed up a friendship? How they were the one who didn't show up, who didn't communicate, who let their insecurities ruin something good? When was the last time someone shared their own role in why a relationship fell apart, not as a performance of self-awareness, but as genuine reckoning?

It doesn't happen. Because that's not what gets engagement. Because that's not what soothes our egos. What gets the likes and the "omg same" comments is the story where you did everything right and they did everything wrong. Where you were patient and they were difficult. Where you were understanding and they were cruel. Anyone would literally come out and talk about how the world is cruel and they're thr innocent little person who's suffering it.

I've done this. We've all done this. We edit our stories, curate our pain, present the version where we're faultless and their intentions were selfish. We post about our "special heart" and how people don't deserve us, and everyone in the comments agrees because they're doing the same thing on their own pages. How we now want to start protecting our peace.

And slowly, we start to believe it. We start to believe that we really are blameless, that every problem in our lives is someone else's doing, that if people would just act right, everything would be fine. We lose the ability to look inward, to ask ourselves what we could have done differently, to sit with the uncomfortable truth that maybe we weren't as good in that situation as we thought we were.

I'm thinking about another scenario from last year. A group project that fell apart. I told everyone it was because my teammates were lazy, unreliable, didn't care about the grade. And some of that was true. But I'm remembering now how I took over everything without asking, shut down their ideas because I thought mine were better, made them feel stupid for not understanding things as quickly as I did. Then I complained that they weren't contributing. But how could they? I'd made it clear their contributions weren't wanted.

The truth is, most conflicts don't have a hero and a villain. Most of the time, two people hurt each other in different ways, two people contributed to the breakdown, two people made choices that led to the end. But we don't like that version of the story. It's too complicated. It doesn't fit into a caption. It doesn't give us the clean narrative we want.

This isn't about beating yourself up. It's not about taking all the blame or carrying guilt that isn't yours. It's about honesty. It's about recognizing that being a good person doesn't mean you never hurt anyone, never made a mistake, never let your ego or your fear or your pain make you act in ways you're not proud of.

Everyone wants to be seen as the person with the big heart, the one who gives too much, the one who's too pure for this cruel world. But nobody wants to be the person who also gets jealous, who also says things they don't mean, who also withdraws when they should communicate, who also hurts people even when they don't mean to.

I'm guilty of this. There's a girl I haven't spoken to since secondary school because of something she said that hurt me. I've held onto that hurt for years, told the story to mutual friends, positioned myself as the wronged party. But I'm realizing now that three months before that incident, I'd betrayed her confidence, shared something she told me in private because I wanted to look like I had insider information. She never confronted me about it. She just started pulling away. And when she finally said something sharp to me, I used it as justification to cut her off completely.

I made myself the victim in a story where I was actually the villain. And I've been telling that story for so long that I almost forgot the truth.

We've turned self-awareness into a performance. We've turned accountability into something we demand from others but rarely apply to ourselves. And the result is a generation of people who are convinced they're always right, always wronged, always the exception to every rule they judge others by.

So maybe the question isn't whether you have a special heart or whether people deserve you. Maybe the question is: are you willing to admit when you're wrong? Are you willing to own your part in why things fell apart? Are you willing to stop casting yourself as the protagonist in a story where everyone else is expendable?

Because if everyone's the angel, then nobody is. And if nobody's ever accountable, then we're all just walking around with our wounds on display, blaming everyone else for the bleeding, refusing to admit we might be holding the knife too.

It's 10:50 PM now. I'm still awake. But at least I'm being honest. At least I'm admitting that the stories I've been telling, the versions where I'm always right and everyone else failed me, those stories are incomplete. The truth is messier. The truth is I've been both the hurt and the one who hurts. Both the friend who tried and the friend who gave up. Both the person who deserved better and the person who could have done better.

The most honest thing you can do is stop performing goodness and start practicing it. And part of that practice is admitting when you've failed at it. When you've been the difficult one. When you've been the one who didn't show up. When your "special heart" was just as capable of harm as anyone else's.

Not every story needs a villain. Sometimes it just needs the truth. And sometimes, the truth is that you were the problem too.