Refusing the Poison of Self-Pity

What I Mean When I Say "Never Feel Sorry for Yourself"

From the very first edition of Existential Espresso, my closing message was always, "Stay strong, love life, and never feel sorry for yourself."

It is something that I try to remind myself of every day, multiple times per day if needed. So I thought it was fitting to include it as a message for all of you who think that what I have to say is worth reading.

And on my post where I asked my paid supporters to recommend topics that they would like me to cover in the future, one of the recommendations I got was to expand on why I say that you should never feel sorry for yourself.

Honestly, I never thought that could be material for a separate post, but when I read that comment, I realized that I do in fact have more to say about it. And that’s what I’m going to try to do this time.

Thank you for the recommendation, David Yohanan.

I have yet to meet a person who’s "had it easy" in their life.

Even though you will meet plenty of people who seem like they have it easy, it is simply an assumption that cannot and should not be made. No matter how comfortable and easy their life may seem, and maybe it actually is on the outside, at the very least you don’t know what’s going on inside their mind.

And even if you knew a person who genuinely has had it easy in their life so far, if you know anything about life, you should know that they won’t have it easy forever.

I am saying this because I believe that every single person has, or will have, in their lifetime at least one reason to feel sorry for themselves.

And I also believe that feeling sorry for yourself shows one of the worst sides of human nature.

So, if everyone felt sorry for themselves because everyone has a reason to do so, we would be living in a world that, in my mind, is a living hell.

To do my part in preventing this, the first and most important thing that I can do is never feel sorry for myself. The next thing that I am able to do since recently is use the platform that I have to tell those who are willing to listen to me that they should never feel sorry for themselves.

What do I exactly mean by "never feel sorry for yourself"?

I mean that you should never consciously use any of the suffering, struggle, or hardship in your life as an excuse. Excuse for not even trying to move forward. Excuse for withdrawing from life. Excuse for being far, far, less than you are capable of becoming. And, in some people’s cases, even an excuse for being a malevolent human being.

When I say, "Don’t feel sorry for yourself," I mean that, no matter what you’ve been through or what you’re going through, you should never take on the role of being life’s victim.

By feeling sorry for yourself and adopting that victim mentality, you are actively making yourself weaker. You are even surrounding yourself with people who consider you weak. Because it’s not enough that you feel sorry for yourself, you want others to feel sorry for you too. There is no place in your life for people who will demand more of you. People who want you to be strong because they know you can be.

If we are honest with ourselves, we will recognize that feeling sorry for yourself gives you a perverse kind of satisfaction. That’s why so many people refuse to overcome and move forward from their struggles. Because doing so will mean that they cannot enjoy the benefits of being a victim anymore.

When I say "Don't feel sorry for yourself," I want you to resist that urge to be comfortable in and even enjoy your weakness.

I want you to refuse drinking the tempting poison of self-pity.

As with many of the things that I write, I will try to illustrate this message even better by sharing a personal story. I would like to talk about when I decided once and for all that I would never feel sorry for myself.

I lost my father when I was 13. When he passed away, that was my first encounter with people feeling sorry for me. But I didn’t feel sorry for myself. My mother did a great job of teaching me that I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself. There were children out there who lost their father much earlier than I did and never got a chance to really get to know him. There were children who lost their father in a violent way. And there were children who lost both of their parents. As the years went by, I met plenty of people, especially young men, who had lost one of their parents and used that as an excuse for every single one of their flaws, mistakes, and shortcomings. I also met plenty of people who lost one of their parents, and, even though that’s a wound that never fully heals, they decided to honor the memory of their parents by becoming people worthy of respect. Encountering these two types of people, who had the same excuse to play the role of life’s victim but chose completely opposite paths, reinforced my stance even further. So I could say my relationship with self-pity was very healthy. That was, until a rather interesting period in my life.

In February 2020, I returned home from the biggest failure of my life up to that point. I returned from a journey to the other side of the world, where I traveled with a single intention: to see the person who I believed was "the love of my life" and try to make things right, or at the very least get some closure so that we could both move on in a healthy way. I was stood up and had to spend the next 7 days roaming around that country on my own, trying to digest that traveling across the world to see this person wasn’t even worthy of sitting down to have a conversation. I got back home as devastated as I had ever been in my life. Seven days after I came back home, I found out that I might never see my brother again in my life. A couple of days after that, I found out that there might be a price on my head and that I shouldn’t leave my house unless absolutely necessary and that I should start making a plan for how to leave my life behind and start a new one.

I started feeling sorry for myself. There is no other way to put it.

While my whole world and the world of my family members were falling apart, I was spending my days sitting in my room, letting the self-pity accumulate.

After a couple of months, a friend who lives out of town came to visit me. He is one of the few people who knew about the totality of my life situation at that moment.

When he came to visit, he hugged me, we sat down, he let out a long sigh, and the first thing he told me was:

"Man, you really can’t catch a break."

It felt good. And not good in the way that there was this person in front of me who cares about me.

It felt good in the worst possible way.

"Here is someone who knows the full extent of how hard I had it, and he feels sorry for me. He is right; I can’t catch a break. I’m a victim of life."

I guess it’s the inner weakness that everyone has inside of them. The inner weakness that just waits for someone to feed it so that it can grow bigger and take over.

His intentions were pure, and they came from a place of love, but he addressed only the weakness in me. He addressed only the weakness and encouraged it to grow. And it felt good.

It felt good the same way overindulging in junk food, alcohol, or drugs feels good for a moment but soon after makes you feel sick.

Why this friend was still there, I realized I had reached the low point that I am not going to go past.

The low points were not the things that happened to me.

The low point was me using those things as an excuse to feel sorry for myself.

That day, when we walked out of the door, I told myself that, no matter what happens moving forward, I will never again allow myself to wallow in self-pity and try to get satisfaction from the pity of others.

I decided that I would never be the victim of life.

After that day, I had plenty of more excuses to feel sorry for myself. I can proudly say that I never did, not even for a single moment.

And it is precisely that attitude of not feeling sorry for myself that allowed me to overcome all of those things that could be overcome. The attitude of not being a victim of life but an active participant in it.

Even writing all of this feels uncomfortable because I don’t like sharing my story, even in as little detail as here. I don’t want you to think that the point of this is to tell you, "Maybe you had it hard, but I had it harder than you, so, you see, it can always be worse." I truly believe that there is no one such thing as having it harder or easier.

And this is not about "it can always be worse." Even though it really can always be worse.

I don’t know what you are going through. And I know many of you reading this are going through a lot.

I feel for you. I have compassion for you.

But if I truly care about you, I am going to treat you the same way I treat myself. I am going to hold you to a high standard and demand the best of you.

I don’t want you to feel sorry for yourself. I want you to recognize that there is strength in you to deal with whatever life throws at you. Probably more strength than you are even capable of imagining.

Thank you for reading.

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