"Which Side Am I On ?" - Diary Entry by Devyani Konkati of B.Sc BTCFS II Year

Picture Credit : Special Arrangement 

This work of mine delves into a deeply personal journey of self-discovery as I grapple with a question that arose from a quote that sparked me to deep dive into my own experiences. All of it that forced me to ask: Am I the victim or the villain?

WHICH SIDE AM I ON?

Dear Diary, 

I felt disgusted today. While I was on my usual social media spree of liking thousands of reels and posts, I came across this one quote “The abused becomes the abuser.” I cannot completely describe how I felt, but, only one question came to my mind, to the person who wrote that, “Whose side are you on?”

Everyone in this universe has been a part of a wrong doing just like me, and I think whether to be the abuser or the abused, purely was depended on us and our choices. People intentionally fail to recognise this and always tend to play the part of the abused, because they never want to seem castigated. Although I need to answer as to “Who is the actual abuser?” I find myself trying to camouflage into something that I myself am unaware of what it is. 

When I think about what I have been through and how difficult the course of life was, I blame all those who played a part in leading me there. But that one particular quote got me thinking if I deserved to do so. I find myself asking, “Am I the abused or the abuser?”. Every inch of me accepted I was abused but not a cell of me thought if I ever hurt or abused someone. While trying to answer this, I noticed to tend to just stay in every shoe except mine, so that I could seek as to WHY it happened to ME. I never saw the world from my shoes. But when I finally put every lego piece of myself together, I realised that it was harsh for me to say, the abuser is the main culprit, because even though they knew exactly what they were doing, and what affect it would have on me, it was hard to swallow the fact that even, I knew all of this and yet chose to be a taunting part of the play. 

So, it becomes inevitable for me to say that a minute part of me chose to sit there and let it all absorb into myself. A minute part of me which didn’t fight back enough, which gave up and accepted all of it. Had I been a little more courageous, a little more fearless and a little more selfish, I would have had the chance to switch from, “Why am I going through this?” to “Why am I letting myself go through all of this?”. And this pulled me back to my senses. 

It is true that the abuser shattered me into countless pieces, but it is also true that I gambled those pieces just for them to toy with those again and again. I had been placing those tiny pieces of myself on stake, to knowingly fall into a pattern of getting hurt again. And that way I became them who abused even the minute parts of me over and over again.

It is still not clear to me as to what it takes to break this cycle, but I now know that, when I stop being the abused I will stop being the abuser of myself. It is clear to me I must stop thinking of myself as a wounded cat that is to be rescued, instead to think of myself as a rescuer who carefully picks every single piece of me and still embraces it as it is.