The Victim and The Villain

The following is a chapter from my #1 Amazon bestselling book.

Every story has a victim and a villain.

Though they’re not the same, they’re different sides of the same self-sabotaging coin.

The question is: which one are you?

Are you the villain? No, I don’t think so. Villains don’t try to better themselves. You wouldn’t have picked this book up if you were the villain.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is, that means you’re the victim.

Fair enough.

But who, or what, is the villain?

December 6, 2015

My twenty-fifth birthday.

My boss gave me a copy of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

In it, Pressfield defines the villain; a villain he calls Resistance—with a capital R.

“Resistance by definition is self-sabotage,” Pressfield writes.

Conceptually speaking, Resistance is the voice inside your head. It pipes up the moment you sit down to write your book; to build your business plan; to paint your polyptych; to go all-in on your gift.

Resistance sounds like:

• “What’re you doing? This sucks. Start over. Better yet, quit.”
• “You think you’ve got something special to give? You’re not ubiquitous or unique. Cut the crap—and the charade. You’re a charlatan.”
• “You’re a fart-in-the-wind. Why work so hard on this when, the day after you’re dead, the world will find someone else to do what you never could? And that someone will be better than you, too.”

Do any of those sound germane? That’s Resistance.

But this book isn’t about Resistance.

This book is about Default—with a capital D.

Default has made you the victim in your own story—rather successfully, I must say, both literally and worldly.

Default, unlike Resistance, isn’t the voice inside your head.

Default is deeper than that.

Default isn’t heard, it’s felt. Default is an implicit sense or belief that something is deeply wrong with you; wrongs that are accepted without being articulated. That acceptance leads to self-sabotage, sometimes unconsciously.

Though Default and Resistance can, and do, work in tandem to get you to self-sabotage, Resistance, like any other villain, can be defeated. The victim, or Default, on the other hand, can’t be beaten. But it can be transformed, or redefined, practically speaking.

As someone who has a PhD in self-sabotage, in my experience, transforming Default is way harder than beating Resistance. Redefining the way you see yourself is harder than engaging in self-sabotage. Which is why we stay stuck in the latter. The former is foreign and formidable.

After reading The War of Art, I couldn’t understand why I kept sabotaging myself.

Beating Resistance wasn’t super difficult. I’d hear it whisper in my head, then I’d offer a cognitive cuss in my rebuttal, and start writing. Bang. Resistance beaten.

Sooner or later, my momentum would slow down until I stopped writing completely. Those innocent inauthenticities Default planted in my childhood tricked me into looking for gold in the dirt—a new Golden Calf. A mentor or coach who helped me acquire money and notoriety, sometimes women—instead of trying to turn what I perceived as dirt, my writing, into gold.

A few months would pass.

I’d read The War of Art again.

I’d go on a writing sprint: sometimes a blog or two; other times a magazine would publish an article of mine. It was only a matter of time before I played the victim again, sacrificing my gift of writing for what my innocent inauthenticities thought success looked like.

This cyclical self-sabotage went on and on for almost ten years.

Why?

Because I wasn’t transforming. I was beating Resistance, but ignoring Default.

I was defeating the villain at the cost of remaining the victim—and I didn’t even know it.

Though Default and Resistance are not the same, they’re different sides of the same self-sabotaging coin.

- Hunter