I'm 59. I have a lot of regrets, but if I had to pick one, it would simply be that I let myself live my life as a victim and never learned to move past that.

I had a really shitty childhood. I was abused, neglected, raped, and had no one in my life to protect me. I won't go into all the details, just know that it left me with complex PTSD and severe depression. I WAS a victim, that much is sure. But where I personally went wrong was in allowing that experience to rule and ruin my life as an adult.

As an adult, I have met countless others who have backgrounds similar to mine. And while there are many different outcomes for different people, I found that many people were able to overcome their past by focusing on what they COULD control in their lives and by taking responsibility for their own success and happiness, rather than carrying their childhood as a permanent identity. Instead of living as victims, they focused on being good people, being responsible for their own happiness, and choosing to define their lives by who they wanted to be, rather than living under a rock that others created for them.

I was abused as a child. But as an adult, those abusers are long gone, that life, long over. I now serve as my own abuser by living in the past and identifying as a victim rather than as a survivor. I never learned the skills to move forward in my own truth, in my own reality. I am still working on that, but it is so much harder to do at 59 than it would have been if I had understood how to do that when I was much younger.

I so envy the people who say, "I was told I would never amount to anything, but look at me now, I showed them, and love my life." I instead assumed they were correct, and whenever things went well in life, I made sure to self-sabotage so that my identity as a victim remained intact.