In another column for KentOnline, Broadstairs writer and dominatrix Melissa Todd reveals how she has been miserable all week...

I’ve been a tedious bore of a misery guts this week. A ‘seeksorrow’, Samuel Johnson would have called me.

This he defined as “one who contrives to give himself vexation”. I’ve felt put upon, trodden down and looked over, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it too.

Nothing like a sporadic wallow in sorrow. Victimhood is so deeply engrossing it tends to lift the spirits even faster than they fell.

Victimhood has become inexplicably, irreversibly intertwined with virtue. That’s odd, isn’t it? If you’re suffering you must be good. Portraying yourself as vulnerable automatically confers high moral status on you, and lowers that of the offender. We’ve accepted this as universal truth, but only comparatively recently.

Once, if someone insulted you, or your family, or did you harm, you’d defend your honour, pay the debt back in blood. Now, if someone offends you, you win, without any need of vendettas. How weird is that? We take offence with equal speed and flair, but resort to social media rather than our duelling pistols. I won’t weigh in to the Depp/Heard business because I don’t care, except to say the paradox was particularly evident here, and in the miles of commentary it generated.

Equating victimhood with virtue began on the left, who were first to embrace identity politics. Consider a few feminists’ angry efforts to exclude trans people from women-only spaces.

To them, women are a special, protected group, who need to be protected from men: womanhood is synonymous with being abused, with suffering. Trans people can’t claim any of that special victimhood for themselves when women have fought so hard to attain it. For me, being a woman is pretty cool, all manicures, handbags and Onlyfans; for them, it’s about being assaulted in toilets and not being the best at swimming, and damn it, they want to keep it that way.

Swiftly, however, the notion spread to the right. ‘They’ won’t let us fly a flag/wear a poppy/celebrate Christmas, for example, whoever ‘they’ are, and despite any evidence. Look at me, I’m a virtuous victim too, and they are big meanies! Once you see yourself as a victim, deliberation and discussion of the issue is no longer possible. There are only your hurt feelings, which must be acknowledged, ruminated and seethed upon.

Playing the victim is enormous fun. But is it doing any of us any good?

Most of us have experienced a sense of oppression occasionally, often justified.

For example, the biggest predictor that someone will end up in low-paid work is educational attainment, and the biggest predictor for that is the postcode where they’re raised.

Obviously there are people who buck this trend, but however hard you work at school, if your house is in the wrong neighbourhood, it’s unlikely to do you much good.

Parents hate the idea that their precious children’s educational attainment is a foregone conclusion.

Middle-class parents want to believe their kids’ A-level results are a direct result of their own talent and hard work; working class parents, that their kids aren’t totally wasting their time with 14 years of pointless, alienating grind.

You can get upset about that, and I wouldn’t blame you, but it won’t help. Given the systemic structural inequalities in our society it’s all the more important to develop personal resilience.

You can be a victim without internalising a victim identity. Life isn’t fair, but adversity can be a gift. It gives you something to fight against. And labelling people as victims, rather than unlucky in one particular aspect, closes down debate; it prevents an honest discourse about why outcomes aren’t equal, thereby overlooking possible solutions, thereby entrenching victimhood, and rewarding people who self-identify as weak, needy and suffering, even though those people are tiresome at parties.

A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present. But it needn’t be. It’s a choice you’re making. Even if you grew up in the roughest postcode in Thanet, there is always Onlyfans. (As long as you’re a woman. Or trans.) Easy to say and hard to practise, but for the health of my bonce, I must stop ruminating on my woes, and start coming up with creative solutions. I haven’t time to change the world to my advantage, so I must change how I respond to it instead.