Self-absorbed people suck.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
And I’ll say it publicly. I’m not ashamed to say it.
But these days, I’ll pointedly direct my vitriol. I feel differently about the sentiment and what it means to be self-absorbed than when I first openly proclaimed it.
You see, when I was in grad school for the first time — I’m a repeat offender, I wrote an article for the graduate newspaper that rather blatantly disseminated my feelings on this topic. Big mistake.
Let’s take a few steps back to those days. I had moved from Ontario to British Columbia to attend grad school. Though I had first moved away from home when I was nineteen, I was never more than an hour’s drive away from my Mom and our family home. By moving to BC, I was a three-plus hour flight away from everyone I knew and loved. I made this trip by myself, not knowing a soul, moving into a ready-made community by taking up a room in a graduate-only residence on campus.
I was slightly older than many of the other residents, given that I’d already survived two full baccalaureate degrees and few years of working in the real world. But, despite my age, I quickly made a number of friends in res. Their being in their early 20s was actually good for me, as I’d never really let loose and lived the life of an undergrad in my two previous academic undertakings, so this was a chance for me to make up for lost time and live like a 20-something undergrad as an early-30s grad student. I drank a lot of beer. I even worked at the grad pub for a few extra bucks.
Classes were going great, I was in my intellectual element, I met a lot of interesting people. And then, a mere three months into first term, I got a call from my Mom disclosing she had breast cancer. I still remember sitting in the shared phone booth in res, the heavy, wooden, bifold door tightly shut, sobbing on the line. Oh, the irony of being this far away from home for the first time, when my Mom needed me most of all.
We made plans for me to fly home for all the major events — surgery, the first few rounds of chemo — but Mom insisted, as mothers do, that I get back to my new life in BC as soon as possible and carry on with my studies.
It was brutal. And damn near impossible. I seriously didn’t give a shit anymore but I carried on for Mom’s sake, to give her something to focus on and talk to me about other than the cancer and chemo destroying her body.
Living in residence was a blessing and a curse. I had friends on whose shoulders I could cry. Cards and candies were sent my way to help me cope. But I grew increasingly agitated, and drank more, as the days went on. My incredible Mom was home, alone, having been single for decades, with only a few people to lean on, living with the threat of death from either her illness or its treatment. And here I was, listening to a bunch of twentysomethings at my res and at the bar and in my classes complain and whine and complain some more.
My essay was so hard I had to stay up all night working on it.
I have to TA this class of undergrads tomorrow and I still have to prepare for it.
I gave my thesis chapter to my advisor and I’m terrified of the feedback.
Chicken and potatoes, again?
This guy in my philosophy class is so hot but he won’t talk to me.
And sure, these things rightfully mattered to them, at that moment. Everything is relative.
But — blah blah blah, bitch bitch bitch, whine whine whine — that’s how I heard it.
I got so pissed off at these young pretenders, acting like they’re so grown up, whilst I was the one truly dealing with grown-up reality, after it had smacked me repeatedly in the face. All their whining and complaining sounded petty to me, so small, so self-absorbed, that I put my irritation to paper.
I went for it. Knives out. It was brutal.
Without naming names, I called them out on all of it. But we lived in a close-knit, small grad res and everyone knew what I was talking about.
It certainly was cathartic. Retrospectively (ah, who am I kidding, I knew at the time, too), my anger and irritation wasn’t truly at my res-mates but was rather displaced towards them, because cancer isn’t a person you can yell and throw pillows at when you’re angry.
The day the article came out. I was working in the pub when it was first delivered. I remember one of my fellow bar staff reading it and asking, “Holy shit, Jen. What did you do?”
Because, of course, what I had done was alienated an entire group of people who otherwise could have been supportive towards me, to some extent anyway. I was deemed a hypocrite, absolutely slayed for my hypocrisy, and shunned by a community of blossoming academics, exactly the kind of people whom you hope would be more enlightened and not react so intensely and with so much hatred.
But I have to remember, they were still just in their early twenties at the time, and I had an advantage over them in the age department, though evidently not in the wisdom department. It was my first graduate degree, but technically my fourth venture into post-secondary education. I had already been through the rigmarole and the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the countless papers and exams, trying to get funding, scholarships, and teaching assistantships, etc.
So, to sit in our little kitchen on the weekends and hear the moaning and groaning about being hungover and having to complete various essays and tests, whilst my mom was over 4000 km away going through chemotherapy but she still had the mental strength and resolve to go to work every day, I had little time to suffer fools.
Turns out they thought that I was the fool. And maybe I was.
Immediately after the article’s publication, the glares began, the shunning began, the not talking to me, staying away from me, and not inviting me to go places. It was quickly obvious that they were pissed. But not everyone had a hate-on for me. There were a few kind-hearted, emotionally evolved mammals, all-around good people who still talked to me, and they told me how the others were feeling.
Of course, I apologized and tried to smooth things over, explaining it was the immense grief, fear, and anger talking. And some accepted my apology and accepted me back in earnest because they empathized with my plight. Unbelievably, some of these intellectuals, these supposedly higher-evolved beings, still treated me poorly, despite seeing how much mental anguish I was enduring. Those sorts never spoke to me again and, though it hurt at the time — one girl in particular with whom I’d bonded so well I thought I’d have a lifelong friendship, I see now that those aren’t the kind of people I need in my life anyway. I need people who give freely of their love, their time, their empathy, their kindness, and their lessons, as well as their forgiveness. I mean, come on, my Mom had cancer and could have died!
Fast forward 15 years, I’m in a completely different place now. I’m married, I have a child, and my Mom has passed on, of cancer, yes, but from a recurrence and not the initial threat. I’m still friends (at a distance, as academics tend to move on to other parts of the world) with the people who supported me all along, and with a few of the ones who briefly shunned me and then unshunned me. And there are the others I haven’t spoken to since the article was published, and that’s fine.
I’ve come to realize that when I was being called out as a hypocrite for acting in a self-absorbed way for writing that article, whilst caring only about my Mom and myself, what I was actually practicing was a form of self-care. Self-preservation. I put up walls so I could block out the daily, menial bullshit and save my mental reserves for coping with my Mom’s illness. I was doing what I needed to do to cope, and if I didn’t have to listen to whining and complaining for a few weeks because those people weren’t talking to me anyway, that worked. I was also given the opportunity to see who cared enough to help me through it all.
So, being self-absorbed doesn’t have to suck. I did what I needed. And I still do, when I am overcome with the persistent grief and missing my Mom; this is self-care. And calling someone else self-absorbed doesn’t have to be hypocritical.
I can say loudly and clearly that the self-absorbed, media-hungry celebrity families that are constantly being shoved in our faces on social media and television definitely suck. Those who make everything about them, those who get famous because of their backsides, those who act like they’re the proverbial second coming of Christ and get TV shows chronicling every stupid move they make. Those self-absorbed people suck and don’t deserve our time.
And I’m fine with saying it.
And I’m fine with you acting a little self-absorbed if you’re going through something, finding a way to cope, needing a way to heal. Self-love and self-care, recognizing what you need to do to get through this life as it gets harder and harder, is a healthy practice. Just make sure you let us empathetically-evolved people in a little, to help you along the way.
