On Rethinking Victimhood
- Srijani Mitra
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Silence, Survival, and Reclaiming the Narrative
I was called a survivor before I understood the word, and styled as a victim long after I stopped recognising myself in it.
I am Srijani, a writer, poet, and educator based in India. Being a neurodivergent survivor myself, I have expressed my thoughts on victimhood and the perspectives on it in this article. I hope this helps you understand and navigate what victimhood is and how it stands in the socio-cultural, emotional, and psychological contexts we live in.
Who Actually Gets to Define a “Victim”?
There is a clear demarcation, a certain neatness in the way we talk about victimhood in public spaces. It is often framed as a fixed identity which is clear, contained, and easily legible. A victim is someone who has been harmed. A survivor is someone who has overcome. These categories feel comforting in their simplicity.
But lived experience is rarely that neat.
I grew up in a home where harm did not always announce itself as violence. It coexisted with gestures of care, with material comfort, with moments that could easily be mistaken for love. I was given expensive dresses and toys, yet I did not feel safe. I was sometimes pampered, yet also hurt, physically, emotionally, and in ways that made my own body feel unfamiliar to me.
This ambiguity complicated everything. Not only my understanding of what was happening, but also how I would later come to speak about it.
If victimhood is a label, then it sits uneasily on a body like mine, that learnt to survive by negotiating the contradictions within it.
I am not writing this to totally reject the term “victim,” but to question its rigidity. What does it mean to exist in a space that constantly shifts between silence and expression, doubt and clarity, harm and survival?
On Dissecting the Quiet Architecture of Abuse
When people imagine abuse, they often imagine something loud, visible, and undeniable.
But much of what happens within domestic spaces is quiet.
In my childhood, harm did not always look like cruelty. It often followed affection. My father could be both someone who provided for me and someone who created violent conflicts that made me afraid of my own home. My mother, in those moments, did not intervene. Her silence was a rupture of its own.
There is a particular kind of confusion that comes from being hurt by those who are also supposed to protect you. Your memories do not form a very clean narrative. They fracture. How do you name that?
Society prefers clarity: the abuser is wholly cruel, the victim wholly powerless. But when those lines blur, our ability to articulate our experiences begins to blur with them.
Embracing Silence as Survival
There is a common assumption that silence is weakness; that speaking out is the only valid form of resistance. But silence, in many cases, is survival. As a child, I did not have the words to describe what was happening to me. Even if I did, I existed within a structure that prioritised obedience over truth.
So, I adapted. I learned to read tones before they escalated. I learned to anticipate conflict before it arrived.
These were not conscious decisions. They were instinctive and almost necessary.
Silence, for me, was not an absence. It was a strategy. A way of enduring an environment I could not yet escape. And yet, even within that silence, there were small interruptions of care. Phone calls with my maternal aunt, who reminded me that I could build a life beyond this one. Conversations with school friends whose own life stories made me feel less alone.
Performing Victimhood: A burden in itself
When survivors begin to speak, they often encounter another challenge: the expectation to perform their pain. There is a script for what a “real” victim looks like. This is quite common in today's reality and what we “expect” of a victim. For me, this created a different kind of struggle, one rooted in self-doubt. Questions overflowed in my head.
Was my experience “serious enough” to count? Did moments of care cancel out moments of harm? Was I allowed to feel anger toward people I had also loved?
Even now, traces of that doubt linger. Trauma does not simply exist in memory; it reshapes perception. A raised voice can still feel like a threat. A shift in tone can still feel like the beginning of something dangerous. These responses are not always visible.
And yet, they are real. What we often fail to acknowledge is that survivors are not just telling their stories; they are navigating the burden of telling them “correctly.”
Reclaiming Space and Narrative Agency
If victimhood is a space, it is not a fixed one. It is something we move through, return to redefine. For me, reclaiming that space began quietly. It began with writing. Putting words to my experiences allowed me to hold them without forcing them into simplified categories. My poetry became a place where I could exist without needing resolution, where pain and hope could sit side by side.
Taking therapy deepened that process. It was not just about revisiting the past, but about learning how to exist in the present without being consumed by it.
There are still moments when memories resurface unexpectedly. When my body reacts before my mind can make sense of it. But there are also moments now where I can ground myself, through breathing exercises, through movement, through the quiet reassurance that I am no longer in that space.
Reclaiming narrative agency does not mean having a perfect story. It means allowing yourself to tell it imperfectly, and still claim it as your own.
Beyond the Labels
Perhaps the issue is not the word “victim,” but the way we insist on fixing it in place. When we treat it as a permanent identity, we flatten complex lives into singular narratives. We ignore the ways people adapt, resist, survive, and rebuild, often all at once.
What if we allowed victimhood to be fluid?
This would mean recognising that survival can look like silence, endurance, denial, creativity, or simply making it through another day.
It would mean making space for stories that are not neat, not linear, not easily understood. Most importantly, it would mean shifting our focus from how survivors present their experiences to how we choose to receive them.
Holding Space for Complexity
I do not reject the word "victim”, but I refuse to let it define me entirely. It is part of my story, but not the whole of it. I am also the child who found support in unlikely places, the person who learned to transform pain into art, the individual who is still, even now, learning how to feel safe in her own body.
Healing, I have realised, does not come from fitting into prescribed narratives. It comes from allowing ourselves to exist in complexity, to acknowledge harm without reducing ourselves to it, and to recognise survival without romanticising it.
And perhaps, that is where the real work lies: not in deciding who qualifies as a victim, but in creating a world where people do not have to justify their pain to be believed.
This article has been sponsored by the Psychiatry Research Trust, who are dedicated to supporting young scientists in their groundbreaking research efforts within the field of mental health. If you wish to support their work, please consider donating.
