It is the early, early morning. The birds are just waking up, and I just woke up from a kind of habitual social anxiety nightmare where everyone I knew and cared about mistreated me, disregarded me, laughed at me. I was trying to deliver some object across some magical realist expanse, in a kind of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory environment, and met all these people in my life along the way. Their abuses and extraneous factors thwarted my mission to deliver the object over and over again. Often for many years now I have these dreams of social ostracization. While the people in the dreams and the interactions seem utterly real, the environment is always magical in some sense, which exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness and unknowability.
I’ve made great strides in the realm of self love and self compassion recently. But in interpreting this dream tonight, I realize for the first time just how much being bullied as a young girl (I’m now a transgender man) shaped my current almost subliminal (so engrained they are hard to see) feelings of inferiority compared to others. THE DARKEST PART IS, these feelings of inferiority have had me act in people pleasing ways which actually do manifest in some people (who are maybe predisposed to bullying) seeing me as inferior, someone not as worthy of respect, someone to use, even if they feel this way only unconsciously. In any case, I am now taking responsibility for the role I have played in my own victimization. At the same time, I must work hard to develop self compassion insofar as realizing the bullying in the past did not happen because of any inherent deficiency within me. Back then, it really wasn’t my fault. In learning to not blame myself for the past abuses, I hope I can take accountability for my own desires to be treated with respect today. Also, it is only a fraction of my friends and loved ones who treat me with this lack of respect. Most do. But the wound opened by these types of bullying people in my life have a disproportionate impact because I think another aspect of having been bullied is that I’m also inherently suspicious of people who claim to care about me, or my peers in general.