“Self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have,” writer and actor Stephen Fry once said in a BBC interview. “And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred—and I think actually hatred’s a subset of self-pity and not the other way around—‘It destroys everything around it, except itself.’”
Most of us, I suspect, give way to the occasional “Why me?” When the car dies on the way to an important interview or that much-anticipated beach getaway is plagued by rain, illness, and mosquitoes, we may briefly feel sorry for ourselves, but that’s a mood that, like the cloud that produced it, passes.
