Why Am I Reading About Angelina Jolie's Alleged Anorexia?

A close friend of Angelina Jolie's late mother has told an interviewer that Angelina suffered from anorexia during her teen years.

"I carried her into the hospital. She was in that anorexic stage," Cis Rundle told Radar.

Rundle went on to say that Angelina enjoyed experiencing pain and that Beverly High School bullies called the future star "Ubangi Lips."

Reading this article, I realized that I'd clicked it only because its headline contained the word "anorexia." This realization embarrassed me. (And now let us chorus: But hey, everything does.) Because the reason I clicked on a story about Angelina allegedly being a teenage anorexic is that I was one too.

And see, who cares? You? In a sense, I hope not. And do I now imagine Angelina as my newfound sister-in-suffering? If so, please pour ice down my back.

Had the headline cited not anorexia but only other aspects of this star -- as countless headlines do, day after day -- I never would have clicked it. Because I don't care.

I clicked it only because, by mentioning anorexia, the article announced itself to me as being about me.

That I would fall for this gambit depresses me. (Ack! There it goes again, the secret weapon that might be wrecking civilization as we speak: the pervasive, addictive pronoun which Dad warned against using in letters and conversations: me.)

Yes, sometimes healing starts with solidarity: the discovery that one is not alone in one's particular valley of bygone suffering. Do I belong to the "anorexic demographic"? Sure. But how attached to that aspect of of my decades-ago past do I want to remain? Need I let the word "anorexia" lure me forever back and back into a comfort zone whose comfort is the revelation of discomfort? Countless articles appeared online today, and first and foremost I chose that one?

I'm not suggesting that we hide our past pain, deny it or be ashamed of it. In certain contexts, sharing what we've undergone can help others survive. But having shared more personal details more publicly than most, and having just now read (because it tricked me into thinking it was about me) an article about a famous stranger who otherwise interests me less than does, say, copper wire, I worry that our range of interests these days is becoming ever smaller, ever more focused on us. Not as us, that is, but as me and me and me.

Link-baitish headlines such as "Canadian Swap Meets You'll Love" and "The 10 Things You Miss Most About the '90s" abound, playing right into this.

How ironic. In an era whose technology allows instant access to all the facts, images, entertainments and individuals on earth, we increasingly seek to speak and hear and read only about ourselves. In an alternate reality, these exact same resources could be turning us all into scholars and virtual world explorers, expanding our horizons exponentially, effortlessly, perpetually and autodidactically. Instead, that vast spectrum of topics that could interest and absorb us is reduced to the instant, empty-eyed digital self-portrait.

My book Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself is about self-absorption of a kind: the self-loathing that we could call "negative narcissism." One healing strategy suggested in this book is the adoption of outer-directed interests and activities. Study a foreign language, help animals, fix cars: To save yourself, think about something, anything, besides yourself. And yet...

In taking the it's-about-me bait, I'm part of that problem. But hey, there's that first-person-singular pronoun again.