I'm currently reading the book "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. I was reading on the train this morning and this particular passage really stuck with me:
"The question of self-pity. People...think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it." We understand the aversion most of us have to "dwelling on it." [...] The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. Self-pity remains the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given. "Our worst enemy," Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself, D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a much quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself."
I'm still rolling this all around in my brain right now. Maybe I'll write more about it later.
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