During the course of giving and receiving therapy it’s become clear to me that many of us live with an apparent paradox: on one hand, part of us is convinced we are a worthless piece of shit; on the other hand, a part feels extraordinarily burdened with great power and responsibility.
Perhaps that burden is “positive”—a sense of a great mission in life, or finding ourselves in a position where we are depended upon in ways that make us irreplaceable. That burden might also be “negative,” an exaggerated and sense of the ways we bring harm to others—”I ruin everything,” “I’m a burden to everyone in my life,” “I destroyed their life.” Either way, our story is of disproportionate power and influence and typically it only goes one way—no one can save me, but I must save everyone; I bring harm to everyone I know, though my sufferings are minimal.
At the heart of both “I’m a piece of shit” and “I’m so important” is the wound of not-belonging. In her book Belonging, Toko-pa Turner speaks of this essential wound of estrangement, in which “you will have felt the rift being torn between who you really are, and who you had to be to survive.” Belonging is a need that reaches deep within our drive for attachment to others—without loving care, we do not develop fully. Yet when as children we feel we cannot be ourselves and belong, we tend to make the sacrifice of authenticity.
Shame emerges like a scab that covers but never heals this wound of disconnection. Should our life experiences remind us of this fundamental alienation—being mocked or bullied, shamed or abused—we are thrown back into the overwhelming pain of it without the loving support that is its antidote.
In mainstream modern culture, many of us have been cut off from the stories of our ancestry, the rituals, and the cultural boundaries that give us a sense of who we are. Instead we have the secret story of being a nothing, a piece of shit, unlovable. This part of us sense we are on our own with our suffering and constantly seeking to find a relationship to heal this wound of not-belonging. The part of us that feels its inflated importance offers a compensation by finding a way to feel we belong, we matter, but still in a way that’s disconnected from the human need to give and receive love and support in mutual relationship.
Narcissistic abuse and cult indoctrination appeals to this wound by offering us the love and witnessing that we desperately crave. This “love bombing” tends to appeal more to the part of us that compensates for our emptiness through “I’m so important” stories. They look deep into your eyes, making you feel seen, and tell you about your beauty, your importance, your innate mission and glory in the world. To be so loved feels amazing. It’s like getting high off connection and your own brain chemicals.
So should our cult or abuser suddenly withdraw all that love and threaten your exile, it’s terrifying. People will give up their values, their wealth, and their lives to stay connected to that vein of love.
We cannot heal the wound of estrangement only through being told how beautiful and special we are all the time. We cannot run from our shame and fears of abandonment, because our pain is like a rubber band that will pull us back with the same energy we’ve used to try to escape. Freedom from our pain only comes when we turn toward it with friendliness, curiosity, and kindness.
In my country, the descendants of colonizers experience the collective wounding of estrangement from that knowing that many of us came to this land through exile, incarceration, enslavement, or the desire to dominate and extract wealth. We made sure to sunder the people who were here before us from their deep belonging to place, and strove to destroy their bodies and cultures to make way for our rampant seeking of wealth.
Those of us who inherited the privileges and benefits of this conquest experience a collective splitting of healthy self-pride. Culturally, our inflation manifests as “the Chosen One” archetype that recurs throughout our most popular stories—Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the vast majority of superhero stories.
In these stories, a particular person is marked out as special and separate from their peers, often gifted with powers and burdened with responsibilities. Perhaps a god blessed them, or a freak accident transformed them, or an ancient prophecy foretold them, but there tends to be an inflated sense of importance granted to their lives. So much is given to them and so much is expected—if you’re so powerful, then how can you let there be suffering in the world? Or you are the only one who can stop this great evil from unfolding.
One of my personal favorites during my adolescence and twenties, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explicitly uses “Chosen One” rhetoric. Buffy is one in a lineage of Vampire Slayers who have been uniquely gifted with strength and skills while burdened with the responsibility to fight vampires and other evils and protect the world until one dies and another is activated.
Buffy is frequently ambivalent about this calling, which she experiences as a trauma that threatens to rob her of the experiences of normal adolescence. At times she runs away; other times she steps into it with so much force that she shoves away her friends and loved ones who would help her.
That essential sense of separation is intrinsic in the Chosen One archetype; that they may be surrounded by support and yet the burden is theirs alone. They must make the hard choices and offer their bodies as sacrifice for the survival of the world.
In Buffy Season 7, when the series explodes the myth by bringing in more young women who are next in line to be “Chosen Ones” once the Slayer dies, one of the non-slayer friends calls out Buffy’s inflation:
And it’s automatically you. You really do think you’re better than we are. But we don’t know. We don’t know if you’re actually better. I mean, you came into the world with certain advantages, sure. I mean, that’s the legacy. But you didn’t earn it. You didn’t work for it. You’ve never had anybody come up to you and say you deserve these things more than anyone else. They were just handed to you. So that doesn’t make you better than us. It makes you luckier than us.
Buffy the vampire slayer, season 7, episode 19.
This speech explicitly links the Chosen One narcissism to an experience of unearned privilege. When given so much by circumstances beyond our personal control, it is difficult not to develop this complex schism of wanting to believe all this unearned wealth and power is a sign of one’s unique specialness. To compensate, we may give ourselves an inflated mission—like white Americans going to Africa to “teach” the people who live there a “better way to live” when those white people have no idea themselves how to live in Africa.
Yet within that remains the paradox, for the privileged heir knows what they have was not gotten from their own labor, that they’ve never had to struggle the ways others do, and may well be incapable of success without what’s been given. A wealthy heir exemplifies this, but to some extent that is in the psyche of many of us who grew up in a time of relative wealth and stability, with parents who had money or education, in a country that was built for us on the blood and labor of others.
Buffy is a particularly interesting example to lift up in light of its creator, Joss Whedon, having been accused of abusive, manipulative, and controlling behavior toward his staff and actors. New York recently published a long interview with him that included an exploration of these accusations and interviews with those who knew him.
This article came out while I wrote this post, and it’s informative to read Whedon’s own words through the lens of the paradox I’ve been exploring here. For the purposes of this discussion, I will limit my discussion to the part of his behavior that Whedon owns and, at the close of the interview, celebrates: that of a micro-managing perfectionist who rejects the insights of his actors into their characters, and their own ad-libbing, instead demanding they say the lines he wrote in the ways he wants them said.
The Chosen One is intrinsically anti-democratic. Not even a king or queen who must listen to their people and tend to their needs for fear of uprising, the Chosen One is celebrated for their stubbornness, refusal to compromise, and ability to cut away anyone who threatens their mission.
Contemporary Chosen One narratives may trouble this by surrounding the character with allies and showing how important those relationships are to survival. And yet few completely escape the paradox: that the Chosen One is more important and knowledgeable than everyone else, and yet simultaneously the one who suffers the most for others’ sake.
Yet we are neither saviors nor worthless pieces of shit. Both emerge from rootlessness and a disconnection from the families or communities that share wisdom, resources, and support. When we don’t have stories of our ancestors to tell us who we are, or collective stories and rituals of belonging to tell us who we are—when we’re compelled to move from our hometowns for economic necessity, or because we have experienced a true exile because of something about ourselves—then our sense of who we are rests on a foundation of shame.
When we are caught up in this trap and allow ourselves to fall into the spell of over-working and self-sacrifice, then resentment, burnout, and martyrdom are guaranteed. Feeling a sense of moral superiority is the consolation prize for not being able to attend to your own needs and happiness.
And, ironically, it’s a prize that’s hard to let go of. There’s nothing harder, I’ve found, in toxic work situations than to have a resentful and burned-out colleague who clearly hates what they’re doing and has contempt for everyone in the organization but also has nothing else in their life to bring them meaning. Even when you directly tell them to stop working so hard, to let go of the responsibility, to let us fail and struggle, they will refuse and still blame you.
Even though it makes them miserable, to step away from that responsibility is to face how much they’ve sacrificed of their own needs and happiness would whelm them in grief and shame. Better to think I’m chosen and special than to risk the vulnerability of asking for what I need from other people.
Often in religious teachings we hear a variation of the insight that a part of our humanity is not of this world. We come from another place—a spark of God, or souls trapped in disconnection and reincarnation. In this life, we are caught between the harshness of living in this world and the compulsive parts of us that are fixated on survival and power on one hand; and the parts of us that remember and long for that other idealized experience on the other hand.
Along with that sense of spiritual otherness is often a greater purpose to our daily experiences. Rather than simply making money, shitting, and washing clothes until we die, we are also here to bring light into the world; to repair what was destroyed; to prepare ourselves to return to divine oneness; to honor the gods and spirits and keep them alive.
These stories are life-affirming and help us to endure and give meaning to the challenges of life, and in established and skillful traditions these teachings are balanced with practices to tame and ground our egos into humble, right-sized connection. Yes, we are all carrying a spark of the divine within us, and what we do in this life matters, so it’s worth making the effort to show up and be who you are. And, we are all little specks of dust in the larger cosmos, our lives barely a fraction of a second in the lifespan of the universe.
Holding that both/and is deeply freeing and relaxing, especially when we can find connection and belonging with people who love and understand us. Everyone has agency and the capacity to spiritually awaken if that is their path, even when we personally disapprove of their choices and want better for them. So we focus on our own work, which is enough for one lifetime, and allow others to discover their own paths. Otherwise we harm them by imposing a path upon them, and harm ourselves by wasting our time not doing our own work.
We get to be humans among other humans, all of us struggling and learning from each other and caught up in the same tides that flow through our history and culture. No one of us is Chosen to stop the apocalypse; we are all playing our part in the unveiling.
