Hero, Victim or Learner?

Every week I look forward to opening up an email from a friend named Jay Sidebotham, who writes a meditation, usually on one of the biblical psalms, called Monday Matters. This week, Jay outlined three patterns we can fall into as we try to make sense of our lives: we can see ourselves as the recurring heroes of our story; as the victims of others; or as learners, perpetually committed to learning from our lives.

It’s a beautiful summary of how we act as human beings. t offers a glimpse of a pathway out of our default absorption with ourselves and our resentment of others, an approach to reframing our work lives, our play lives and our spiritual lives. Jay’s conclusion?: “The role of learner is the way to go.”

Here’s what I understand about those different ways of framing the world.

At work, those of us hooked into the “hero” narrative of their lives have a frame to fit every work event into: I got the job/contract/promotion/money on my own, through my hard work and cleverness. When heroes play, we tell ourselves we succeed because of our hours of practice and superior skill and brilliant strategy. When our lives of the spirit go well, if we acknowledge the existence of a higher being at all, we tell ourselves “God shed His grace on me” -- because I earned it. 

We are always right when we tell ourselves our hero stories. Everyone else is a background character (image generated using deepai.org).

Those with a “victim” worldview share with heroes a me-centered perspective on life. If things go wrong at work, it’s because people were focused on thwarting me: I would’ve gotten the job/contract/promotion/money if it weren’t for my conniving colleague, my incompetent work team, the other guy’s connections or a deck stacked by politicians/liberals/conservatives/foreigners/redheads. On the court or the field or at the table, we could’ve won if it weren’t for the refs or bad teammates or dumb coaching or cheating opponents or uniquely bad luck. In our spiritual lives, if things go wrong, well, God or the gods or the unfaithful were unfairly conspiring against me. 

When we see ourselves as victims, we imagine we are St. Sebastian, helpless, under relentless attack by a world out to get us (image generated through deep.ai.org).

I’ve found myself playing the hero and victim in my own life, sometimes at the very same time and, trust me, maintaining those narratives is exhausting. It requires us to continually manipulate objective reality. 

Some of the “heroes” among us were actually “born on third base,” but for the hero narrative to work, we have to convince ourselves that, as former Texas Governor Anne Richards once put it, we “hit a triple.” Every study I have seen has debunked the myth of the “lone entrepreneur,” who singlehandedly built the enterprise – it always takes a team. Good athletes work hard to develop their skills, but they never succeed without a little luck and a lot of help.  And we don’t earn our way into heaven.

Convincing ourselves that we alone are responsible for everything good that happens in our lives is just plain arrogant. 

Victim narratives don’t usually hold up to close examination either. Most other people are too focused on themselves to waste time ruining our lives; if they obstruct us, it’s more often out of self-absorption than malice. And surely some of the fault “is not in the stars, but in ourselves.”

Convincing ourselves that others alone are responsible for the bad things that happen to us requires a complete surrender of our own agency and a rejection of community.

Adopting the “learner” approach to life doesn’t mean we have to abandon doing the hard work or strategic thinking that “heroes” pride themselves on. And it doesn’t mean we have to naively imagine that aren’t others whose goals may aligned against our success. It just means making a pivot to humility, an admission that there is something bigger than us.

·      A person who insists on being the hero of their story believes there is nothing more to learn -- that instead the world should learn from them. 

·      A person who insists on being the victim of their story believes it doesn’t matter if they learn, because the world will thwart them no matter what. 

·      A person who sees themselves as a learner can still appreciate the part they played in their own success, but also acknowledge the role of others, and learn from both. A learner can see the role others played in a failure, but also examine their own failings, and learn from both. 

The Greek Odyssey protagonist Odysseus could have viewed himself as a hero or a victim. He chose to embrace the role of learner (image generated using AI by Meta).

The mid-20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described the relief that I think can come when we admit that we live in a complex world with other people, a world we can’t fully control. Some people call it the “serenity prayer.” It is remarkably short and simple: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

Serenity doesn’t mean surrender. It doesn’t mean paralysis. Instead it is a fundamental reorientation toward viewing every experience -- magnificent triumph/dismal failure, small victory/tiny setback, pain/glory and everything in between -- as something we can learn from.

That ain’t easy in real time. And it’s hard to give up on the narratives – hero or victim, or sometimes both – that we have fought so hard to convince ourselves of. But there is deep comfort in learning that we don’t have to go it alone, and power in the slow-growing suspicion that we are better when we don’t.

Notes: 

Link to Monday Matters: https://renewalworks.forwardmovement.org/blog/monday-matters-there-is-more/

To find out more about Jay Sidebotham, his newsletter and his ministry, go here: https://renewalworks.forwardmovement.org