I stopped wallowing in self pity after my brain cancer diagnosis

Why I refuse to give in to self-pity

Hospital chic

Hanging up the phone to my neurosurgeon, I felt a familiar pang.

There it was: the self-pity that came whenever things weren’t going my way. A valid feeling, of course, but one I’ve learnt not to indulge in. It only ever made me feel worse.

One week earlier, I had been admitted to hospital after an MRI showed a tumour in my brain. The very same neurosurgeon had sliced into my skull and taken a biopsy.

Now he was calling to say the tumour was more aggressive than he’d initially thought, and I would need to come in for another surgery. Oh, and by the way, Miss Feltham. It’s definitely cancer.

If there’s ever a moment to feel sorry for yourself, it’s probably being diagnosed with incurable brain cancer at the age of 36. But there was a time I didn’t think I’d make it past 25, let alone into my 30s. It was the strangest thing. Whenever I took a sip of alcohol, I found that I couldn’t stop drinking until I was either blacked out in some random pub, or naked in a stranger’s living room. Sometimes both. Often consecutively.

A fabulous picture of me during my drinking career

Soon I realised that I was experiencing alcoholism, and with it came my introduction to self-pity. The cycle went like this: anger that I couldn’t drink like everyone else, sadness that it was happening to me, then frustration at my futile attempts to change the way I felt by—you guessed it—drinking. And so the cycle began again.

When I first explored the concept of sobriety, I started speaking to alcoholics who didn’t drink anymore. One of my favourite phrases they would say was, ‘poor me, poor me, pour me another drink.’ I thought it was brilliant. If only I could get past the drink pouring part.

Eventually, I did get sober and haven’t touched alcohol in over four years. But it wasn’t immediate that I stopped reacting to life’s hardships with self-pity. That took a bit more practice.

Celebrating 3 years of sobriety

When I was 33, I went through my first sober break up. I had been seeing a Canadian man I met on a dating app, and just like everything else in my life I took a shine to, I turned him into a full blown obsession. My new drug, if you will.

I was two years sober when he ended things with me. I thought, rather naively, that since my issues with substance abuse had been resolved, I’d also figured everything else out, too. No more life lessons for me, thanks! I’m fine now.

As it transpired, I had very little figured out, and the pain from the breakup sent me back to my old ways. I never touched a drink, but I did spend weeks alone in my darkened bedroom, lamenting all my failures. I was using self-pity as a coping mechanism, only I wasn’t coping at all. I was making myself even more miserable.

It was then that I started attending therapy.

There, I realised that it was me who was, in fact, the problem. It’s normal to feel sad about life’s challenges from time to time. But I had managed to turn this way of thinking into a persistent pattern that was thrusting me deeper into despair.

Plot twist: it was, in fact, me who was the problem

My therapist, who I still see today, told me that the antidote to self-pity was self-compassion. This absolutely blew my mind, and so did the advice she gave me.

Next time you find yourself wallowing, try separating yourself from the person who is experiencing the pain, and empathise with them. Yes, what’s happening is hard. But no, it’s not your fault. That’s what self-compassion is, and it takes a lot less energy to do than giving yourself a hard time.

These days, when something unfortunate happens—like a medical professional telling me that I have brain cancer—I can recognize the signs of an oncoming pity party. My inner voice will claim how unfair my life is. The more I think about how everything always happens to me, the more distressed I feel.

So, I stop for a moment and picture myself at a crossroads. I can either obsess over my disappointment, settle into the role of a victim and inevitably feel worse. Or I can show myself a little kindness and accept that things won’t always turn out the way I them to.

Now that I’ve given up feeling sorry for myself, my attitude to life is a lot more hopeful. I may be powerless to control whether or not I survive cancer, but I can take charge of my internal narrative. Sure, this is a terrible thing to have happened. But it won’t stop me from avoiding the self-pity highway, and instead driving down the path of self-compassion.