when people share such stories, they’re not trying to steal anyone’s thunder or stick a wedge into someone’s happiness. In an odd way, they’re trying to share in it.
When our son became engaged, and we related some of our experiences in dealing with the traditions and expectations of others, we quite naturally fell into retelling our own horror stories. We weren’t indifferent to our son or his bride, but we could only speak to what we knew, and that necessarily meant turning the subject us-ward. In situations such as these, people end up talking about themselves, often at length, because it’s what they know. In a way, they are helpfully demonstrating that the difficult things bridal couples and new parents focus on so intently become — with hindsight and the balm of time — hilarious memories.
Such oversharing is usually well intended, and most of the time it does not leave us feeling like we have just played straight man for the gratuitous amusement of an empathy-challenged narcissist who is, in the end, quite indifferent to us.
The “little sin” of excessive self-interest is distinct from narcissism, which is a personality disorder and a legitimate illness, because it involves us making a choice to prefer our own interests, our own stories, and our own voices over those around us.
Not long ago I had lunch with a few business associates, men I had corresponded with but never met. After discussing work issues, which I managed to do like an adult human being, we quite naturally began to chat about our families and personal lives, and that’s where my circuitry went a little haywire. Both gentlemen managed to mention their spouses and children with obvious pride and affection, but with what I would call a seemly restraint.
Not so, Lizzie. Oh … not so.
Now, I grant you, I work from home and sometimes will go a whole day without the opportunity to use my tongue, so when I get around people I can be a bit of a motormouth, and I know it. On this particular afternoon, I had been housebound due to illness; it had literally been weeks since I’d had real conversations with anyone beyond my family, so the pump was primed. Once I began talking about my sons, I lost all sense of professional decorum and began to gush like a broken water main.
The men were perfectly tolerant of the torrent, but while my mouth was flapping, my guardian angel began shouting an interior cue that sounded a lot like begging, or a heavenly face palm: “Please … stop … talking. Ask them something about their kids, like a normal person would!”
Finally, I was thrown a six-word lifesaver: “You mentioned your son studies biology,” I said to the man on my left, and as he answered I felt myself mercifully pulled out from the verbal deluge, only slightly worse for wear.
The devilish spirit of excess thus departed from me, but only because I really wanted it to, and had made a choice to let someone else brag a little, and to actually be present to, and enjoy, the pride he took in his son. I could just as easily have chosen to ignore my better angel and prattled on until my companions, lacking guns, or ropes from which to hang themselves, instead scalded their throats with hot coffee swallowed too fast, in order to end the meal and make their escape.
Excessive self-interest involves choosing to either be considerate of others or completely immune to them. It is a “little sin” for certain, because when we indulge it, we tend to stop seeing the equally interesting humanity of the people around us. They become utilitarian objects; receptacles for our endless streams of me-thought and mine-words. We overwhelm them with our yelps or burden them with our yokes; and although it might — at first consideration — seem like a measure of insecurity is involved in this excess (“Seems, madam? Nay, it is!”), all of it, even the insecurity, is a function and by-product of pride.
I have a friend who is a terrific conversationalist. He can chat extensively with anyone, and do it with a good deal of empathy and charm. People love to talk with him because he manages to convey the sort of warm and lively interest that makes people feel good about themselves. He chooses to be friendly to people who are friendly to him, with one exception. That exception is me. No matter how I try to fall into the “friendly chat” category, I never quite make it. In the odd moment when I manage to squeeze in a few words, he will look away and keep talking — about anything at all that is going on in his life — as long as it means not engaging with anything at all that is going on in mine.
It wasn’t always that way, but over the past 20 years or so he has become unsure of himself around me, and therefore afraid, and in that state of insecurity his choice is to protect himself with a wall of words. At a picnic a few years ago, I deliberately brought up issues in my life, just to see if I could raise any sort of authentic response from him, toward the actuality of my presence and my personhood. As expected, I could not. Any subject I tried to broach he immediately used to completely ignore me by turning the subject to himself. If I mentioned a child’s recent bout of bronchitis, he spoke to the air about nearly dying of pneumonia; when I mentioned a sudden opportunity to visit Vienna, he had a long cruise to think and talk about.
It was a little like playing tennis with someone and having every serve volleyed back, over the head, with no possibility of engagement.
Eventually, I gave him the serve; I stopped talking about myself — thus offering him no chance to lob a topic out of reach — and instead just flat out asked, “So, what’s new with you?”
He simply said, “Nothing.”
Nothing. Game incomplete. There was absolutely no way he was going to directly respond to, or acknowledge, anything about my life, and he certainly wasn’t going to give me any sort of opening by answering, as he might to another, “Nothing, what’s new with you?” I understood — probably better than he did — that he had made a choice to block me, until I was effectively absent from his presence.
Another friend had watched the whole exchange and said to me, later, “Wow, he really hates you.”
“No,” I disagreed. “I think he actually loves me a lot, which is why he can’t bear to be around me.”
“That makes no sense,” he said.
“It does. Once I told him something I thought he needed to know; it turns out he didn’t. He thought I was trying to be cruel. Now, he can only feel bad around me, so he does that thing you saw.”
He looked at me askance: “Were you cruel? Intentionally?”
“No, I really wasn’t, not intentionally,” I said, sadly. “I was just very, very stupid, and stupidity made me cruel.”
That, of course, was my own prideful mistake, and guess what? It was born of excessive self-interest. The self-help movement of the 1990s, which I had bought into, taught me to focus excessively upon myself, and to “honor myself” — like a little idol — by burdening another with an offering of truth best left unshared. Everything that followed came from my own terribly grave and destructive little sin of me-ism, taken to an unhealthy extreme.
Here be monsters. In the case of that relationship, as no opening to ask forgiveness will be permitted, what healing may come between us, at this point, I leave to God’s discretion, and to the prayers of good friends.
And I impugn no sin on the one unwilling to engage with me. I think his unwillingness may fall under Just War guidelines, as a necessary means of self-preservation. Like the Catechism says, “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor…. The one is intended, the other is not”1 (n. 2263).
I indict only myself, a witless and self-interested aggressor.
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