[_Cane_]

I was excited to hear you write about this topicbecause I think I really relate to this one. For me, I have a huge history of believing that I am victim to my own poor decisions and lack of will power to make the right ones. I used to blame my parents and make some weak excuse that they "never taught me the right way". And that I was just merely the culmination of their bad parenting skills. I really believed that. I never on any major level had taken responsibility for my own life and my own direction. I actually focused on THEIR anti-social behaviors and flaws in my own parents and used that as an excuse for why I am the way I am. It got so bad to the point where I never felt I had to put any effort into my own life because I could always just use my parents as a fall back to make myself feel better about the way I am. "Awe, well, I did the best I could with the poor way I was taught". Thankfully, I am no where near that mentality today.

There is one thing that I want to make a comment about based on my own experiences. With time comes investment. The more time you spend being a certain way, or continuing a certain belief, or any given opinion about yourself... the more that way, belief, or opinion will solidify itself in your mind. You will actually on the deepest of deep levels believe that that is who you are. The longer you spend in this state, the harder it is to pull out of it. Pulling out of it means to actually change who you are. Whether you really are that person or not is irrelevant. Because all that matters is, you believe thats who you are. Its the belief or perception of yourself that needs to change. And it is incredibly difficult on so many levels to change who you are because of the ego. For example, I speculate that a lot of older guys in their middle aged lives have trouble with change the most because they have spent most their lives doing things a certain way. If a guy has spent his whole life believing in communism, for example, do you think its possible to teach him to adopt democracy? Of course its possible, I'm just trying to illustrate how much more difficult it would be, based on that time created that investment where he believes that a communist is literally who he is. He has given so much time to that belief that it would be like admitting to himself that he was wrong all these years. Make sense?

I truely believe the victim mentality is essentially, the beginning of the downhill struggle for people. And in contrast, it is also the beginning of the uphill struggle when they are willing to accept and change.

Fucken awesome post and my hats off to ya.

Cane