Feeling sorry for oneself or self-distancing?

I have a habit that many people undoubtedly experience as unsavoury. I wear my heart on my sleeve, even on social media. I speak and write openly about my struggles in life.

But I do not do it to ask people to feel sorry for me or to feel sorry for myself. Of course, I ask here and there, “Why me?” but life’s brutal answer is always, “Why not?” Life doesn’t owe us anything, and it doesn’t promise anything either. We conjure up — quite on our own — optimism, pessimism, or what Viktor Frankl calls tragic optimism: taking suffering seriously and trying to discern meaning in it or despite it.

I express myself because developing an experience of suffering into its full linguistic form is, for me, an act of self-distancing. In self-distancing, it is possible to see one’s situation more objectively and evaluate where one stands in relation to one’s suffering. And so, you are no longer engulfed by whatever suffering you find yourself carrying, but can take a stand against it. From that position, you can start to figure out what is the most valuable and therefore meaningful thing you can do with the suffering, or despite it.

Pierre Hadot sees what Frankl calls self-distancing as an ancient philosophical exercise: looking at your situation — or indeed all the hustle and bustle — from a bird’s-eye view, relativising whatever troubles you. When you look at yourself or the world from the skies, you see a bigger picture, where subjective suffering is just a part of a much larger cosmos that does what it does despite one’s personal troubles. I have found that comforting ever since I, as a small boy, took my father’s binoculars and gazed at the moons of Jupiter. I was part of a bigger whole, logos (meaning, order, cosmic structure) — the very thing logotherapy’s name points back to.

Yesterday I realised that the stress I have been under lately had again fully depleted me, and there was nothing I could do anymore. I could barely get out of bed. Having suffered some incredibly hard and long — up to three years — periods of depression, I was worried again that this day might be the start of another one. I am lucky in that it wasn’t.

But in that dark moment, I wrote a Facebook post and vented. I described exactly what I experienced. Why I chose to do it “publicly” to my small Facebook circle, rather than as a private therapeutic writing exercise, is a good question I’ll return to.

The important thing is that I wrote. People responded with those nice heart and care emojis. A couple of friends wrote me a few comforting words that truly made me feel less alone, which mattered because in that moment I felt like an alien nobody could possibly understand. I am grateful for all comments and reactions.

With that, I had self-distanced. My emotions of isolation, loneliness and meaninglessness felt a little bit less overwhelming, even though I still had enough emotional upheaval that I definitely couldn’t think as clearly as I do most days.

And so I could engage with what is meaningful in my life. Not with all my heart and my full capacity, but a little. And that little mattered. I did some research for my next Finnish book and wrote a few paragraphs. Normally, I am a relatively fluent reader, and I write like I am obsessed. Words just pour out of me, and things come in exactly the order I need them to be to convey my convictions. But now I was limited to writing a few paragraphs to complete an essay I had been working on, and it took a lot of iterations to get it right. And I could read only a few paragraphs so that I actually integrated what I was reading.

But that was enough, and that was all that life asked of me. And I got to cling to meaning and self-transcend just a little bit. And I could do it because I self-distanced through writing a moaning Facebook post.

With that, yesterday was not lost to depression, but a day of small meaningful action despite emotions of despair. Viktor Frankl teaches that suffering is somehow mitigated by meaning. Suffering with meaning equals hope. I lived this truth again in my small way.

So why do it on my Facebook page and not in silence, like a properly dignified person surely would? The simple answer is: I cannot write for myself. If I try to, absolutely nothing comes out. My therapist suggested a long time ago that I do it, and the end result was the thinnest journal after the invention of writer’s block. I have tried it every now and then, but my words flow only if I write into the world. Perhaps it is an instance of meaning coming from reaching beyond oneself, as Frankl puts it?

I actually learned a long time ago, when I first started blogging about living with complex trauma, that it does serve a purpose: suffering is universal, so somewhere, here and there, what I write strikes a chord and someone with the same experiences feels a tad less lonely in the world. That brings meaning to my suffering.

For those who ask: if I am having days like this, surely I should be in therapy? I was, for over 15 years. I learned a lot, lost most of my savings in the process, and finally realised that I had overstayed my welcome. It is up to me, and only to me, to figure out my life. Frankl teaches that as we are responsible for every choice we make in life, so we are also responsible for how we suffer. It is not an easy lesson.