The Martyr: Chapter 17
Characters facing real or imagined persecution
If self-worth rises and falls with public attention, then any audience—even an army of prosecutors—is steroids for the ego.
When Bad Things Happen…or Don’t
I’ve always been intrigued by people who constantly see themselves as persecuted.
I’m wired differently. If I feel start to feel aggrieved about something, I immediately construct alternative explanations for the situation where I’m not the victim. I try to see if from others’ perspectives. I look at it as an opportunity for self-improvement. My motto is “Don’t get mad, don’t get sad, just get better.”
I think there’s little upside and huge downside to building victimization into your identity.1 It makes you focus on sadness or fury. It can make you lethargic, anxious, and/or vindictive. It can manufacture false “learned helplessness,” meaning you inadvertently train yourself to feel powerless over your circumstances.2
I wanted to explore these ideas in COMMUNITY DAY. So I decided to create a “martyr” character, someone who exaggerates his/her distress.
But I wanted the character to have a defensible rationale for constructing this martyr identity. This is the purpose of Chapter 17—to show Kim’s sense of persecution and explain how it came about.
False Persecution
Kim gets a job running an animal shelter. But early in her tenure, things go sideways. She imagines that she’s the target of a smear campaign.
Kim started showing up at the weekly public meeting of the county commissioners to speak out against the scandalous claims being made against her management and leadership of the animal shelter. She was hurt. She was indignant. She was determined to stand up for herself.
The only problem was that no one was aware of any scandalous claims being made against her. There had been no newspaper stories with accusations, no officially filed complaints. No one had the slightest clue what scandalous claims Kim was talking about.
Kim refuses to take the rumors sitting down. She fights them with all of her might. But, again, there are no rumors as far as anyone can tell. No one knows what she’s fighting against!
She’d sign up to speak during the public-comment portion of the agenda, and then, when called, launch into a vociferous defense of her sullied reputation: Her behavior, she argued, was unassailable; her leadership record lacked even the smallest blemish. She fought without rest against scurrilous charges that—as far as anyone could tell—didn’t exist.
An Explanation
I didn’t want to spend chapters psychoanalyzing Kim. So I spent months and months reworking an explanation for her behavior. I got it down to four paragraphs.
The gist is this. We all get a sense of identity from our community, the people and places nearby. When those people and places disappear or turn against us, we need to reconstruct a positive identity. It is impossible to quickly acquire esteem, but it is possible to acquire attention.
Here’s the explanation from Chapter 17:
According to my sources, over the course of her weekly presentations that summer and fall, Kim grew increasingly unmoored—unmoored from her community and therefore unmoored from reality.
She was now a single mom with all the stress and shame that the status carries in such an area. Maybe in earlier days, when the county was confident and open, Kim would’ve been taken up by a network of friends and neighbors and had a freezer stocked with meals prepared by strangers. But for whatever reason, once an area becomes insular and vulnerable, it feels stronger when it makes its circle smaller. By some, she was shunned. By some, she was forgotten. Even those with whom she’d had a hugging relationship now kept the equivalent of six feet of social distance. Kim occupied a vanishing part of the community’s attention.
But strangely, while testifying to the commission, Kim appeared composed, even satisfied. Fending off imagined foes strengthened her. There’s an old saying: “We’d care less what people thought of us if we realized how seldom they did.” I think Kim had somehow internalized the opposite of that lesson: She was tortured by the idea that that no one was thinking about her. She cared enormously that she might never cross others’ minds.
But if she had antagonists, even if fictional, then she must be at the center of something. She must matter. So the more she understood herself as a victim, the more her confidence swelled. If self-worth rises and falls with public attention, then any audience—even an army of prosecutors—is steroids for the ego. The story Kim told herself (important public figure) was the only counterbalance to the message she had been receiving loud and clear from everywhere else (abandoned middle-aged mom).
The Prequel
I think there’s more to mine in this area. What does persecution—whether real or imagined—do to us?
So in the prequel, I have five versions of this in mind.
A priest is wrongly persecuted and fights every day to not allow it to affect him.
The female lead was persecuted in graduate school, it devastated her, and she tries desperately to pretend that episode never happened.
The male lead was persecuted as a child, and he built skills and dispositions to never let it happen again.
The main villain is rightly persecuted and loves it.
Another villain with a mysterious role invents—like Kim—persecution to achieve a goal.
For previous installments of this explanation-and-exploration series:
Chapter 1: Introducing Key Characters
Chapter 2: Forest and Breadcrumbs
Chapter 4: Heisting from Hamlet
Chapter 6: The Mysterious Stranger
Chapter 10: The Madness of Covid
Chapter 16: Split Personalities
Some people, including some athletes, use perceived persecution as motivation. But I’ve found that while it can lead to short-term benefits, in the long-run it’s corrosive.
But I’ve wondered if some people purposely use perceived persecution to excuse inaction. It is hard to try hard. It is hard to be resilient. So if you have a reason to not try hard and not be resilient—”there’s nothing I can do!”—you can excuse your own lack of effort.