A few nights ago, my ex-husband told me he thinks I am self-absorbed. And honestly? I agree with him.
I think people hear the phrase “self-absorbed woman” and immediately picture somebody vain. Somebody emotionally shallow. Somebody obsessed with attention, appearances, or making everything about themselves.
That is not the version of self-absorbed I became.
Mine was built slowly through survival, grief, anxiety, trauma, motherhood, disappointment, therapy, heartbreak, and years of trying to emotionally hold myself together with duct tape and caffeine.
My life forced me inward.
When enough painful things happen to you, eventually your internal world becomes louder than the external one. Your brain starts functioning like a never-ending group chat between every version of yourself that has ever been hurt.
You replay things.
Analyze things.
Question things.
Try to understand things.
You spend so much time trying to make sense of your own life that eventually people start interpreting it as self-obsession.
Maybe sometimes it is.
But I think there is an important difference between somebody who only cares about themselves and somebody who got stranded inside themselves after years of emotional survival mode.
Coffee Cups and Childhood Mathematics
Let’s rewind. I can pinpoint where some of this started.
When I was little, my dad had his anger issues. My mom tried to protect us from the bigger reality of it because we were kids, so she would soften the explanation into something easier for a child to process.
“He’s grumpy because he hasn’t had his coffee yet.”
So I started paying attention to coffee.
Had he drank any yet?
How much?
Was the cup empty?
Was he still tired?
Did we need to wait before talking to him?
Little-girl me genuinely believed I could emotionally solve the adults around me if I just paid enough attention to the patterns.
Unfortunately, coffee was not the issue.
What my mom could not explain yet was substance abuse, stress, emotional dysregulation, adult problems, and all the complicated things children are too young to carry.
But by then, the wiring had already happened.
Monitor the room.
Watch people carefully.
Stay ahead of the mood.
Try to prevent the explosion before it arrives.
Children should not have to become emotional detectives inside their own homes, but many of us quietly do.
Then we grow up and people call us “too deep” because we learned to survive by constantly analyzing human behavior.
The Prison Inside My Head
I relayed to my therapist that my first ex-husband called me self-absorbed, and she agreed. She said I live trapped inside my own head like Rapunzel in her tower, pacing circles while waiting for rescue that never quite arrives.
Every trauma forced me further inward because when your external world feels unstable, the brain starts searching internally for answers, solutions, explanations, and ways to prevent future pain.
Why did that happen?
How did I miss it?
What should I have done differently?
How do I stop it from happening again?
People think self-absorption always looks loud and confident.
Sometimes it looks like somebody mentally pacing circles inside their own mind at 2 a.m. trying to emotionally outrun every bad thing that has ever happened to them.
Sometimes it looks like somebody desperately trying to understand themselves because understanding feels safer than chaos.
And honestly? It does not feel fun in there.
It feels crowded.
Every version of me exists there at once. The little girl tracking coffee cups. The exhausted mom trying to hold everything together. The woman replaying arguments in the shower. The version of me still trying to understand why love keeps feeling emotionally conditional. The version trying to become “better” enough to finally earn stability.
Meanwhile, life keeps happening outside the tower.
Which is honestly the cruelest part.
Because while I am trapped inside my own brain trying to emotionally solve everything, the world keeps moving around me. My daughters keep growing. Seasons keep changing. Songs keep ending. People keep disappointing me in ways my brain still insists on trying to fully understand before letting go.
And maybe that is part of being self-absorbed too.
Not believing your own pain is the only pain that matters.
Just becoming so psychologically tangled in your own inner world that sometimes you struggle to climb back out of it.
The Contradiction
The irony is that despite being self-absorbed, I care too much about other people.
Painfully too much.
Enough that it exhausts me.
Enough that I absorb moods that are not mine.
Enough that I overextend myself emotionally.
Enough that I still want to understand people who hurt me.
Enough that I can explain someone else’s trauma while actively drowning in my own.
My mom once said,
“We sacrifice our happiness for the happiness of others.”
And unfortunately, that sentence rooted itself inside me a little too deeply.
Because that is exactly how I have always loved people.
Accommodating.
Understanding.
Explaining away behavior I should have walked away from.
Making myself emotionally smaller so everyone else could remain comfortable.
Trying to keep peace even when it was quietly destroying me.
That contradiction confuses people sometimes.
How can somebody spend so much time focused inward while simultaneously caring so deeply about everyone around them?
But I think the answer is actually simple.
When you spend your entire life emotionally studying people for survival, you become deeply aware of pain. Not just your own, but everyone else’s too.
You notice the shift in somebody’s voice.
You notice exhaustion hiding behind humor.
You notice when somebody suddenly gets quiet.
You notice when somebody is pretending to be okay badly.
And once you notice those things, it becomes hard to stop caring.
That is the exhausting part.
I do not think I became self-absorbed because I stopped caring about others.
I think I became self-absorbed because I cared about everyone for so long while nobody consistently helped carry me.
And maybe that is part of what happens when somebody deeply inward collides with somebody who rarely looks inward at all.
One person overanalyzes every flaw, every reaction, every wound they may have caused. The other protects themselves from self-examination like it is a house fire.
So the relationship slowly becomes emotionally lopsided.
One person carries the guilt.
The other carries the control.
One person keeps asking, “How can I fix this?”
The other keeps asking, “How can I avoid blame for this?”
Eventually, the self-absorbed person starts collapsing even further inward because they become the only one consistently trying to emotionally account for what is happening.
Eventually, your inner world starts screaming for your attention because it is tired of being abandoned too.
The Funhouse Mirror
I think trauma turns your mind into a funhouse mirror.
Every relationship.
Every betrayal.
Every abandonment.
Every disappointment.
Every cruel thing someone says during an argument.
It all slightly distorts the reflection.
After enough years, you stop seeing yourself clearly.
One person says you are selfish.
Another says you give too much.
One says you are too emotional.
Another says you are emotionally unavailable.
After a while, you start feeling like a collection of conflicting opinions instead of a stable person.
And maybe that is part of why I spend so much time trying to understand myself.
I am trying to locate the real version underneath all the warped reflections.
The Part I Am Still Learning
I think the hardest thing I am still learning is that self-awareness does not automatically create safety.
Neither does empathy.
Neither does over-understanding people.
Neither does loving people deeply enough to explain away every wound they hand you.
You can understand somebody completely and still get hurt by them.
You can love somebody deeply and still feel emotionally alone beside them.
You can spend years trying to become easier to love only to realize the people around you were asking for pieces of you they were never equally willing to offer in return.
And honestly?
That realization will trap a person inside their own head for a very long time.
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