‘The tumour is more aggressive than we initially thought,’ my neurosurgeon said over the phone. ‘You need to come in for another surgery as it’s cancerous.’
After hanging up the phone with my doctor in May, of course I felt devastated and afraid.
But overwhelmingly, there was a very familiar pang: the self-pity that came whenever things weren’t going my way.
Now, if there’s ever a moment to feel sorry for yourself, it’s probably being diagnosed with incurable brain cancer at the age of 36.
But I just could not escape this intense feeling. I sat there for a few minutes as the words ‘why me’ repeated in my head. I focused on my breath, my heart racing as I tried to calm myself down.
It’s not the first time I’ve felt overcome with all-consuming self-pity.
In my mid-20s, whenever I took a sip of alcohol, I found that I couldn’t stop drinking until I was either blacked out in some random pub, or naked in a stranger’s living room. Sometimes both. Often consecutively.
Soon, I realised that I was experiencing alcoholism, and with it came my introduction to feeling sorry for myself.
The cycle went like this: anger that I couldn’t drink in moderation like everyone else, sadness that it was happening to me, then frustration at my futile attempts to change the way I felt by – you guessed it – drinking.
By the time I hit 30, my mental health was at an all-time low.
The relationship I treasured so much that I moved to New York for it had broken down. I lost two jobs for showing up to work drunk.
Thoughts of ending it all were such a regular occurrence that I barely batted an eyelid at them anymore.
All I could do was sit alone on my front doorstep, chain-smoke and ruminate over how miserable I was.
I didn’t realise that I was self-pitying at the time; I thought I was dealing with my problems. But soon, I had completely isolated myself from my family and friends, leaving me with nobody to turn to at all.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I moved back to the UK. I was 32, living back at home with my mother and deeply depressed. I realised then that my life had gone terribly wrong. If I wanted to create a happy future for myself, I would have to stop drinking.
So, I started to speak to alcoholics who didn’t drink anymore. One of my favourite phrases they would say was, ‘poor me, poor me, pour me another drink.’
I thought it was brilliant. If only I could get past the drink-pouring part.
Eventually, I did get sober at age 32 through 12 step-programmes, opening up to my loved ones and a lot of self-reflection.
But it wasn’t immediate that I stopped reacting to life’s hardships by wallowing. That took a bit more practice.
When I was 33, I went through my first sober break-up. Just like everything else in my life I took a shine to, I turned him into a full blown obsession. My new drug, if you will.
Rather naively, I thought that since my issues with substance abuse had been resolved, I’d also figured everything else out, too.
No more life lessons for me, thanks! I’m fine now.
As it transpired, I had very little figured out, and the pain from the break-up sent me back to my old ways. I never touched a drink, but I did spend weeks alone in my darkened bedroom, lamenting all my failures.
I was using feeling sorry for myself as a coping mechanism, only I wasn’t coping at all. I was making myself even more miserable.
It was then that I started attending therapy. There, I realised it’s normal to feel sad about life’s challenges from time to time. But somehow I had managed to turn this way of thinking into a persistent pattern that was thrusting me deeper into despair.
My therapist – who I still see today – told me that the antidote to self-pity was self-compassion. This absolutely blew my mind, and so did the advice she gave me.
Next time you find yourself wallowing, try separating yourself from the person who is experiencing the pain, and empathise with them.
Yes, what’s happening is hard. But no, it’s not your fault.
That’s what self-compassion is, and it takes a lot less energy to do than feeling angry about what life has dealt you.
Like the time an exciting project I was involved in got cancelled last minute. Rather than blame myself and obsess over what could have been, I acknowledged my anguish and offered some love to my inner hurting self.
These days, when something unfortunate happens — like a medical professional telling me that I have brain cancer — I can recognise the signs of an oncoming pity party.
My inner voice will claim how unfair my life is. The more I think about how everything always happens to me, the more distressed I feel. So I stop for a moment and picture myself at a crossroads.
I can either get consumed by my disappointment, settle into the role of a victim and inevitably feel worse. Or I can show myself a little kindness and accept that things won’t always turn out the way I thought they would.
Now that I’ve given up feeling sorry for myself, my attitude to life is a lot more hopeful.
I may be powerless to control whether or not I survive cancer, but I can take charge of my internal narrative.
When my oncologist told me I would spend the summer undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, for example, I refrained from shutting out the world to lick my wounds. I accepted the daunting experience ahead of me and gave strength to the part of me that was terrified.
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Sure, this is a terrible thing to have happened. But it won’t stop me from avoiding the self-pity highway, and instead driving down the path of self-compassion.
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