When I was young and dumb in elementary school, I'd sometimes hurt myself by slamming my head into the closet door or wall out of feelings of rage and hopelessness due to fellow students (placed in gifted in elementary school, I was often seen as a freak or outsider, got bullied/ostracized sometimes, you know how it goes). Once I even did it against the gymnasium's toilet stall door. I'm impressed I didn't give myself a concussion with all that, but that's unimportant. Which is exactly the problem: it's such a small, distant part of my life now, but whenever I bring it up as a relevant example of something (e.g. someone wonders why in a particular story a character says "I usually went hungry when I was a kid" so casually, and I explain that it's because they were young and so it's no longer as important after they've grown up), I always wind up feeling like a filthy attention whore because people feel sorry for me, even though I'm not personally fazed with bringing it up. And every time I try to rephrase it in a way that won't seem like I'm talking about it for attention, that's what winds up happening anyway and I just wind up embarrassing myself trying to put it in a way that doesn't come off as self-absorbed.
Reason why I say posting it here will only exacerbate the problem is because I feel that people are just going to feel like I'm trying to milk even more attention from it by putting it in yet another place to see, but I seriously would like advice on maybe how to phrase it so that it doesn't seem like I'm attention-whoring or coming off like "I inflicted self-harm a few times when I was ten years old and you should feel sorry for me." I don't mind talking about the events themselves, but I always wind up feeling like a worthless piece of shit for bringing it up.
And compared to other, more serious physical and mental problems that children can inflict on others in school (and life), I feel even more pathetic whenever someone acts like it was a scarring event that traumatized me or something, or I imply in any way that it was. I get this urge to tell them off for thinking so and saying that my long-done-and-over problems ain't shit compared to some people, and that they should worry about helping them, not feeling bad for me.
And then I feel even more horrible for ever feeling anything about something so relatively petty that happened to me in the first place.
ClaviSound wrote:(e.g. someone wonders why in a particular story a character says "I usually went hungry when I was a kid" so casually, and I explain that it's because they were young and so it's no longer as important after they've grown up)
As a perfect example of my above point, I feel absolutely shitty for comparing me just slamming my head with a door to something as serious as starvation.
I bring it up if it's relevant, because it did happen to me and I can speak about it firsthand, but comparing it to other sensitive topics makes me just not want to talk about it at all. If you want to call me out for being a colossal sissy, attention-whoring, and for comparing my tiny problems to more critical issues, you should, because that's what it sure feels like to me. Again, I don't know what possessed me to post this here, because I just feel like even worse of a person than I did when I was starting to write the post.
I just want advice on how to bring it up in a good way that won't arouse pity or come off as attention-whoring.
