It may not be clear to my readers up until now that the purpose of this blog is indeed in the name. If this purpose isn’t clear, it is not surprise to me as my mind is a chaotic and contradictory wonderland full of whisping thoughts, unexpected emotions, and abrupt intersections of the past, present, and future. I don’t hide this chaos in the content I post here. However, my goal all along, and as I continue on, is to become an expert in the science of working together. I started this journey about 2.5 years ago, the evening before my 25th birthday. Just today, though, did I discover what is the first lesson in the study of how to truly work togther. That lesson is to stop pitying yourself.

Consequence is a Gift

Perhaps this seems like a harsh first lesson, well, you could say it is, or skip the pitying part and accept it as it is. To have someone tell you, “stop pitying yourself” is a gift, if anything. Why is this? Why is it a gift to recieve blunt feedback? The reason is because the people in the world who we aspire to be….those people don’t pity themselves.

While I have received, perhaps, similar feedback in the course of my life, I will say that it was not until two days ago that a friend of mine finally blatantly told me, “stop pitying yourself,” those words exactly. Maybe someone had said this to me before two days ago, but if so, I didn’t actually hear it. The words matter. If you have ever been an instructor of any sort or been instructed in anything, especially something particularly technical, you may have noticed that there was a light bulb moment that allowed you to master an aspect of the skill. This light bulb moment is what instructors strive for and they don’t accomplish it by saying and doing the same things over again, that would be insane, according to Einstein. What they do, actually, is search for the words their student needs to hear, they search for what it is that speaks directly to their student. It can be as simple as using a synonym that allows an athlete, for example, to finally understand what it is they aren’t doing right.

Learn From Your Mistakes

So, why did my friend tell me to stop pitying myself? He said so because I made a mistake, perhaps an unforgiveable one. I crossed a boundary and although I was the one who made the mistake, I was the one who was the most upset about it. He was fine, I was not. He was harmed, but I acted as the wounded one. Those words were painful to hear, sure. Of course they were! Noone wants to be told they are pathetic. We want to be comforted, that is why we humans put on a pity party. Because if we were lucky enough to grow up in a compassionate home, our tears and pouting encouraged our caregivers to give us the nice and ego stroking attention we so desperately crave. There is nothing wrong with being compassionate and I am grateful for the plethora of compassion I have received from my loved ones during my life, it certainly pulled me out of very dark places. However, this compassion didn’t teach me lesson 1 of working together with other people.

Successful People vs. The Commoners

Successful people, I speak about success in a comprehensive way and it includes financial success, do not pity themselves. If they come from rich families, I can promise you that they still must have done something right to continue their success. Even if not, it is irrelevant. They are successful, and you, maybe, are not. The point is, it is better to look at the situation giving people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their past because that is out of their control, just like it is out of your control.

Successful people hustle every day of their lives. They don’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves for not having the thing or things they are striving to obtain. They just keep working, each day, to get closer to their end goal. Consistency like this doesn’t have time for self-pity, because you can’t consider yourself consistent if you spend hourse, days, weeks, months, or years wallowing in your own misery. The friend I am speaking about in this post is a person who could retire tomorrow and live luxuriously, from the common folk perspective, for the rest of his days. Therefore, him telling me to stop pitying myself was an incredibly valuable gift because I realized in that moment that someone who lives in the world I strive to be a part of believes in me enough to tell me the truth to my face. Whether or not I can redeem myself with him is uncertain. However, rather than feeling sorry for my mistake and begging for forgiveness, I’ve decided to take action and grow from this experience. I can guarantee I will never make the same mistake twice because I was spanked with words and I wish to learn from that.

Underdog Mentality

Stop using your demographic as an excuse for not being successful. This is a form of self-pity. The feminists reading this won’t like what I have to say next. I wholeheartedly agree with Victoria Montgomery Brown that in the current world, I’m talking about now (December 4th, 2020 maybe even a few years before), it is easier for women to start a business than it is for a white man. Deep down, you know it, too. It is true that thanks to feminists raising the issue of unequal opportunity, the new reality is that the scale has tipped in favor of women when it comes to entrepreneurship. However, it is ignorant to say that white men still have the upper leg. Why? Well, old white men and others who have already achieved their entrepreneurial success are not interested in helping out a young white man, because the world is already saturated with successful white men. The women are being given more opportunities, even if just to satisfy a diversity requirement. So the women that are being given more opportunities and being chosen over their young white male competitors, better not take the opportunity for granted and continue playing the, “well, it isn’t fair because I am a woman” card if they don’t succeed. This mentality won’t help those women propel forward because the people higher up the food chain will see right through this approach.

Underdogs who become successful don’t make excuses for their current lack of success. As an athlete, I felt this and whitnessed this all the time. I recall a volleyball game in which my teammates and I were aware that we were stronger and more skilled than the team we were playing. The entire game was a disaster. We walked in thinking it would be a cake walk and forgot how to play volleyball. The other team walked in not caring that we were higher ranked, they stepped on the court ready to play the game and that was the only thing on their minds. My team lost that game, if my memory isn’t tricking me. What I know for certain, though, is that our coach was incredibly disappointed.

As a pole vaulter in high school, I had my fair share of moments pitying myself for not being the best of the best, however, by some miracle during my senior year I was undefeated in the state and became state champion. While I received a lot of negative feedback for the way I interacted with the newspaper journalist who interviewed me about my success, I have a hunch that it was my mentality at the time that allowed me to win that title. The journalist asked me, “How did it feel to win?” my response was, “I knew I was going to win.” It certainly isn’t an attractive response, definitely not humble in any way, shape or form. I won’t even say that I am proud of it, I actually apologized to the journalist later that day. However, in that moment I was still feeling the pressure because my opponent was so close to beating me, she was able to jump higher than I was, but that day, I didn’t let the thought of losing enter my mind. I believed that I would win and I ignored that she had achieved a better personal record than I did earlier that season. I won because I cleared every bar on the first attempt, meanwhile she had one miss. I won because we had been rained out on the expected day of the competition, meaning that we had to get into the competitive headspace two days in a row (a difficult thing to do when competition is fierce) and it didn’t affect me at all, I was grateful for another day to vault. I won because I stepped onto the track and ignored the fact that it had been my 18th birthday the day before and noone showed up to my birthday dinner. I won because I wasn’t pitying myself, I wan’t looking for consolation, all I was looking for was the chance to prove that I was the champion, and so I did.

“Stop Pitying Yourself”

Life is difficult for everyone. While the famous and the rich get to enjoy a more “comfortable” lifestyle in terms of the things they can afford, the places they can see, and the experiences they are opportuned to have, they are always placed under a microscope. They don’t have the freedoms that the general public do in terms of truly being oneself. If I walk out the door in a catsuit, I’ll get some weird looks, but I’m not going to be plastered all over the tabloids with titles like “Finally lost her marbles” or “Is she proving a point or just insane?” I have never in my life been afraid to be myself and I am privileged, so privileged for that. This is not the case for the people who seemingly have everything one could ever want.

It is true that not everyone is given the opportunities they deserve, many people are not. However, the stories we hear about someone coming from the ghetto and becoming a multi-millionaire or the gay man who changed the world of rock and roll, these stories contain a protagonist of the same nature. The protagonist in these stories decides to stop feeling sorry for all the horrible things he, she, or they went through. They stop defining themselves by the challenges they have endured and instead start using these challenges only as stepping stones which allow them to present themselves as the person they always hoped to be.