
The digressive, prescient brilliance of DH Lawrence’s essays - Petiver
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/01/our-perpetual-contemporary-digressive-prescient-brilliance-dh-lawrence-s
======
hprotagonist
Basically all I know of him is a short poem of his called “Self-Pity”:

 _I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead

from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for

itself._

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Sometimes in life you need to feel sorry for yourself and allow yourself to
acknowledge that your circumstances are bad, especially if you don’t have a
support network around you to offer that external acknowledgement or
validation.

Just like you have to forgive yourself for mistakes and challenge yourself to
do better or motivate yourself to achieve goals. A human mind needs all these
types of things, and when you can’t get them elsewhere you have to get them
internally, as a basic measure of self-care. This applies to self pity just
like anything else.

Widespread criticism or derision of feeling sorry for one’s self is like
victim-blaming, societal defense mechanisms built up in more primitive times,
denying psychological realities of human consciousness in favor of tough man
caricatures derived from a type of Puritan ethic hangover.

~~~
everdrive
Agreed. Advice that you "can't feel sorry for yourself" feels a lot like much
of the other broad, emotional advice out there: aimed at an assumption that
most people are trending too far in one direction, and the greatest good is in
correcting that direction.

