There’s a haunting about, and it’s not even Halloween.
It’s the ghost of self-pity, better known as “Why Me?”
It creeps up even among the strongest of us, and hits when you least expect it.
This ghost presents itself in some distinct, wild forms:
Guilt: I did X, and then Y happened.
Example; I called Sheela fat, and then she slapped me with her fat hand.
To avert from the pain of Sheela’s embiggened palm, you can hurt yourself a little more by being upset that you hurt someone else with your comments.
From there you have a choice: revel in misery (boo), vow to do worse next time because Sheela deserved it (also boo), or apologize and try to do better next time (yay).
Manipulation: Bad things happened to me, therefore can you give me something?
Example: Sheela is making others feel bad in exchange for free cookies.
This one isn’t very common outside of mental illness, but it’s still one to watch out for. It can happen in ways big and small though, because this form of self-pity is like Drakkar Noir – it spreads.
Fatalism: everything bad always happens to me, I belong in Eeyore’s gloomy place.
Example: Sheela is moping in the break room, eating cookies, because her car battery went dead this morning when she was already late to work.
This one isn’t quite manipulative, but can easily be. It’s pattern recognition overdrive, where everything from the rain to a parking ticket to your boss yelling at you all in the same morning is reason for self pity.
Random: something happened among the absolute randomness of life to me.
Example: The Goodyear Blimp crashed into Sheela while she took out the garbage. The vagaries of life are completely random and bad things do happen, as do good things. A Mario Kart sized banana peel can sneak up on you in the produce aisle. You can receive a medical diagnosis that you’re terminally thicc.
You don’t have to be haunted by the specter of these examples or Sheela, who murdered a perfectly nice blimp pilot.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
—DH Lawrence
Self-pity isn’t a scary ghost. It’s an awareness of our own existence, of our own mortality, of an attempt to understand some type of pattern in the way that things happen. Our brains are wired to search for this type of causality, even when none exists, and sometimes our sense of identity becomes warped with events entirely unrelated to us.
When you realize it’s just an attempt to understand, self-pity isn’t a scary ghost, it’s more of a Casper – childish, inquisitive, and ultimately harmless.
In an attempt to understand “Why”, let “Why Me?” become “Why Not?”
Anything can happen, and that’s good or bad depending on your mood and proximity to Sheela.
You don’t have to be scared of self-pity.
Or even let it in at all.
