Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself

 

“If anyone has a reason to feel sorry for themselves, it’s me.”

This is something so many of us say to ourselves, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Nothing seems to be going right. We’ve got chronic pain, our finances are crap, we’re estranged from friends or family, our kids don’t behave, our marriage is on the rocks, our business venture didn’t go the way we thought it would, our stocks are down, our crypto is down, our mental health is down, we’re basically just unhappy with life.

 
 

For many years, I didn’t realize I was feeling sorry for myself. Externally I touted positivity, surrender, and looking at the bright side, but didn’t really understand that in a deep part of me, I still viewed myself as a victim of many of my circumstances.

The weird thing about it is that I felt comfortable there. I had long believed that suffering was a mark of goodness. If I could suffer with a smile, I was really doing something right. I carried that mindset deep in my bones and it made me highly suspect of happiness and things that felt great. I didn’t think I deserved to feel happy, or perhaps it was that happiness wasn’t a valid metric for my life. I viewed being a “suffering servant” as a mark of holiness, for lack of a better term. Because of some of the early childhood lessons I learned, I would cringe at the line in the Declaration of Independence that said it was our right to pursue happiness. I had somehow internalized that my right was the pursuit of suffering.

When I started to really question this mindset, my brain got very, very agitated. My brain love being where it feels familiar and comfortable, even if the comfortable place isn’t healthy.

“There is a condition known as locked-in syndrome in which a patient is fully aware but completely paralyzed, unable to speak, and forced to communicate simple yes or no answers using a computer. Most people will claim they would rather die than have to live this way. The curious finding is that not only is the average quality of life found in these patients quite high, but their brains learn to stop struggling with their condition very quickly, often within hours. They cease all desire and strain because the impossibility of controlling the external world quickly becomes unambiguously apparent.”

I found this phenomenon so interesting because of the level of acceptance of their new reality that is stunning. Here’s the deal: all of us are all locked-in to some degree because there are many things that are completely outside of our control. A big one for me is having a daughter with this rare, incurable, terminal disease (MPS, Sanfilippo Syndrome 3a). I can’t do anything to change that diagnosis, delay her death, or stop the tide of neurological and physical changes, but I can choose how to view these circumstances and live life.

This isn’t a call to toxic positivity. It’s not sweeping hard feelings under the rug, pretending they don’t exist, never addressing grief or sadness or anger. It’s about managing my mind. It’s paying attention to my thoughts, especially the unhelpful ones that say poor me, or this shouldn’t be happening to me, or why me? This is a radical call to a mindset that says It’s supposed to be this way because it IS this way. We create suffering for ourselves on top of difficult circumstances when we fight against them.

A better way for me to think is “Okay, this happened. Now, what am I going to do with it?”

This is about empowerment, autonomy, and resilience. It’s grabbing life by the cajones and choosing what to do next. It’s allowing yourself to feel whatever you feel, whenever you feel it, and then deciding if what you’re feeling is going to help get you where you want to go or be an obstacle to true happiness and satisfaction in life.

Our brain will do more of what we tell it to, so we need to give it good directions. The world is as good as it’s ever been or as bad as it’s ever been depending on where we look. We change our lives by changing our minds, not our circumstances. And then, wonder of wonder, our circumstances start to change too after we’ve changed our minds because we have trained our brains to look for the things that contribute to our happiness.