All month I’ve been letting go of things that have bogged me down, be it a shameful number of links I’d bookmarked to read later or unhelpful habits that I’ve fallen into. Rearranging the blocks of one’s life, however, can be quite tiresome. As a respite, from time to time, I have luxuriated in self-pity. Elisa Gabbert’s essay on the subject, “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms,” is illuminating. She calls self-pity a “strong self-cure” – somehow, indulging in it helps one feel better. She writes that everyone has “a hyperbolic self-pity phrase they repeat to themselves for pleasure and comfort,” and that her personal go-to is “Nothing good ever happens to me.” I’d consider myself a fool to resort to that one, but it did make me wonder what mine is. I think something I return to often is, “No one ever taught me/told me about this when I was young.” Something about avoiding responsibility and shifting the blame this way really works for me – “if I just didn’t see/understand something back then, how could the consequences have been my fault? – but why didn’t anyone tell me/stop me?” – it’s the perfect mix of anger, helplessness and resignation. It’s easier see sense afterwards, once I have wallowed enough. It feels great, then, to put myself back together and try to work on more pressing matters.
I have very little to say today. I’ve been reading things. I’ve been quiet mostly. I’m grateful and yet I feel like I’m making my way through a dense crowd, unable to think of much besides the elusive destination.
I am more grateful than ever for the steadiness of online friendships. Some of my closest friends as a teenager were fellow readers and writers I’d met online. The fact that we couldn’t easily meet had somehow brought us so close. A friend once called us her “roommates, living every day with me.” Today I see how much of that was a way of escaping our “real” lives. These were people who lived in my phone, and whose phones I lived in. And we were almost always on our phones – almost always elsewhere. Now that we’ve grown up, these relationships have changed (for the better, I’d say) but they continue to offer extraordinary freedom and support.
This diary entry of a rabbi moved me immensely: profound loneliness, the risks of reduction.
How I love this Georgia O'Keeffe painting:
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Babe
This was so very nice 🥺🥺🥺.
It was so very relatable, and has made me feel so much better.
I used to beat myself up harshly, in my own head for my self pity sessions, and then it would lead to a cycle of feeling sorry for myself and then being viciously cruel once again... all it did was make me feel even more worse than before.
So reading this made me feel very much relieved 😭😭😭. Like I was being granted permission for something I hadn't even known that I needed.