That is a really interesting set of thoughts to read. I hope you will forgive a rather long response that does not connect my personal experiences more directly with the idea of nobility and oppression until the very end of my post.

My personal experience has been that of feeling victimized by my own body and generally without any kind of outside force to blame for the problems themselves. But even without an outside force to blame, there’s no question in my mind that I often have a sense of nobility about my suffering and feel superior when it comes to dealing with doctors and psychologists who try to help with those issues. They might be trained professionals, but I am ultimately the only one who knows what I have been through and what I can handle. They can make suggestions about what I should do or try, but whenever I am physically able, I make the decisions. The only times I feel victimized by outside forces when it comes to my health are the times when I am too ill or in too much pain to make those decisions and others make what I later consider the wrong decision. Most doctors and psychologists I’ve seen can’t deal with the fact that I consider them consultants and collaborators in my treatment rather than seeing myself as a patient to be acted upon.

One of the things that I often feel is that my sensory experiences are superior to other people because of the degree of deprivation and pain I’ve experienced. Think about going backpacking or camping and the way that water and food taste so much better and the experience of drinking is so altogether satisfying. It really cannot be imagined what it is like to be deprived of food and water for a week unless you have been through something similar. But with my childhood illness, having vomiting comparable in intensity only to food poisoning and having that degree of vomiting last a week—well, the satisfaction of being able to drink water and eat again is also unimaginable unless you’ve experienced something similar.

In all fairness, I have no idea if this experience is actually as wonderful and superior to being able to eat and drink to a healthy degree every day as I suppose it is, but I need to believe that it is in order to feel like having gone through all that was not in vain. And with health problems now where I am not so deprived of something essential to life to such an extreme degree, even with being in and out of therapy with so much fear of being so sick again and nightmares, flashbacks, and other PTSD goodies, even with all those undesirable aspects of having lived through all that, I still miss both the deprivation and the thrill of recovery! There is absolutely nothing that I have ever experienced in my entire life that even comes close to the pure pleasure of the first glass of water after a vomiting episode. Is this because something as simple as water is truly so pleasurable in that moment or because I psychologically need to believe it’s so pleasurable in order to accept the previous deprivation? I just don’t know. Probably both. While there are times when I suppose that my body is the most awful and worthless burden, there are other times when I could not feel more fortunate and know that anyone relatively healthy could never know how sweet it is to feel like you’re dying and coming to life again, over and over and over! If it’s full of it or false nobility or anything worse to think any of this, I’ve figured out that it’s necessary to feel this way at times in order to sustain the will to live.

That was a very long and circuitous way to get at why I think there is a simple psychological principle at work when it comes to coping with feelings of victimization. What I said earlier about my wariness of doctors and psychologists can also be considered from the perspective of any oppressed individual or group dealing with outside “authorities” who purport to know what’s the best or most appropriate course of action for improvement of circumstances. I might be mouthing Foucault on this one, but those outside groups with status as authorities will tend to make decisions that keep them in those positions of authority and keep the oppressed in their place, regardless of good intentions, education, and intelligence.

For the oppressed individual or group, that feeling of nobility is a necessary step toward moving forward in situations where they might otherwise feel so oppressed that they would not strive toward a better future or want a future at all. Is there some point in the path of healing and working toward the future where that feeling of nobility becomes no longer necessary yet the will to live remains? I’ve never met anyone so flawless.