Our species, unfortunately, seems to be the handy-work of a rather sadistic deity, one who lives inside peoples' heads, along with all the Laws of Nature and Science, all thought-ghosts, really. It is literally all in our heads. Goddamn, that Buddha of Berlin was so on point with his laser-sharp insight when grasping for the tail of the riddle of existence: "The world is in my head, but my head is in the world." This goes along the same lines to what you were attempting a couple years ago: to be a knower as opposed to being a sufferer. Is it a matter of shifting perspectives? I used to try it as a child, if I am not mistaken. Yes, I would try to see myself as the "subject" of some kind of Nature Documentary -- or story ... or Lab Experiment Gone Haywire ... that's what the notebooks sometimes became, just my own "lab logbook" articulating any kind of report on the status of yours truly, His Creaturelyness ... I rather like to imagine myself as a frail yet wiry kind of naked and humiliated chimpanzee, but I try to maintain a sense of humor until it really hurts --- which could come out of nowhere.
Feel free to complain about the ramifications of having been born, and the worst is yet to come for all of us … but there is the age-old folk wisdom and many deranged senses of humor who take great delight in knowing that this phantasmagoric insane asylum existence can fade to black in a matter of seconds for any living creature.
It is rude for the religious to console others with promises of relief in an afterlife. That minimizes the often legitimate indictments against the burden of existence.
In my interactions with others (in my personal monkey-sphere), I have noticed that another's malice and resentment toward me (for some joke/comment made) wounds me only when I forget that the ugliness within is festering
within them. You notice beauty in sensitivity, where others see sensitivity as weakness.
It's a Dosteovskian Nightmare Existence. In order to minimize the psychological and emotional pain inflicted upon us by abusive/toxic/hurt individual human animal creatures, we may need only to pause in reflection in some kind of mobile Fortress of Solitude.
As in The Razor's Edge, we may need to focus in on the Devil in the Details ... just where "the social disorder" begins to make the genius deranged, where "reality" slips into a surrealistic blur of dismal awakenings and depressing realizations.