Like, Hi, Fer Shurr,

During the 1990s, I was 10 through 20 (I was born during 1979), and it seems to me that during the 1990s (and the early 2000s), it was sooo cool to be a major "Pity Kitty" in the most extreme ways.

I mean, a girl in one of my grade school classes was mean towards me, and instead of telling her to go fly a kite, the other girls excused her behavior because her parents were going through a divorce.

When I got to college (1997), it was cool for girls to brag about each and every form of abuse that they'd suffered from.  During my time in college, I had a total of 5 roommates.  The first wasn't a Pity Kitty, but she wasn't ready for college, because she was still sad about a high school friend who had died.  In her depression, she accused me of being against her, and then, before our Autumn Freshman semester had even ended, she left college!  My second roommate was a spoiled baby!  She was adopted, and she claimed to have been molested by a total stranger.  She said that it was her job to tease me.  Our acquaintance claimed to have been traumatized because her brother used to hit her on the head; whenever somebody tapped her on the head in jest, she'd launch into her sob story!  One of my last roommates had total issues.  She had had an abortion, and she treated her boyfriend, who had at first abandoned her, but then returned, like her servant.  She'd literally threaten to rip my head off whenever she got angry with me.  One night, I spent an entire night in a platonic male friend's room (We really were just friends, and he was a true sweetheart for allowing me to stay with him) because my roommate demanded that she and her boyfriend use our room for sex; she WAS going to use my blanket, too, and I was so bullied by her that, had my mother not told me "You'd better NOT allow that!", I probably would've allowed such rude behavior. 

One day, I totally "snapped" during one of my classes.  We were discussing the issue of rape, and because my head was so full of all of these darned sob stories, I angrily announced that I felt as though I was an anomily because I HADN'T been raped!

You know, MY family life wasn't perfect, and I have always been a medical patient, etc., but if I mentioned my medical condition to that spoiled rotten roommate (The one who thought that it was her job to be mean to me), she accused me of being a Pity Kitty; she should've been more understanding, because she used hearing aids, and I was understanding of her!

I did purposely starve myself during college, but that didn't bring me the "Awww!"-type of attention that I was expecting, and I didn't go around singing the blues to everybody about my situation.  I did cry when I was down around 78 pounds, but that was because I was wandering around with Strep, and with no dorm room fridge, food, etc.

I STILL sometimes feel as though I haven't suffered enough.  I once (Within this decade) accused my poor father of having set me apart from my peers because he WAS, for the most part, there for me (Were MOST 1990s kids REALLY the products of homes that were THAT broken?)  I still sometimes feel as though maybe I SHOULD have cut my wrist, at least once, or something unbearably stupid like that, in order to have been a TRUE 1990s kid.  ACK!

I mean, was every one of my childhood Christmases supposed to consist of Mom passing out from a combination of Anorexia and sleeping pills, while Stepdad counted out the drug money before he passed out on the stained easy chair, leaving me to sort the Santa presents from the assortment of hypodermic needles, rusty beer cans, moldy McDonald's leftovers, and recent divorce court papers, and dreading the impending visit from my uncle, who molested me after each and every Christmas dinner during my entire childhood, while forcing me to watch football games with him?  I mean, c'mon, SOME people HAD to have been serving everybody else a steaming pile of horse pucky back then, with regards to how bad their lives were!

To be fair, I guess that ALL people suffer at SOME point during their lives, but then, there are those who force everybody ELSE to suffer through the drama of their stories of suffering (I will admit to probably having done that just now...), and then, there are those who just like to concoct stories...   
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Okay.  THAT was a rant, and don't you FORGET it! ;D  If you're ABLE to forget it, I HOPE that that means that you did NOT absorb so much "Pity Kitty" nonsense, as I did back then.
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ANYWAY, did YOU ever experience the "Pity Kitty" scene during the 1990s, and, if so, how did you react to it?  I hope that it didn't impact you as badly as it has always impacted me.
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Is Pity Kitty for guys or just girls?
???

Valley Goth,

First of all, sorry that you went through all of that. I'm not quite sure what to say :-\\. Ok, secondly I just want to quickly note that I am a year younger than you. I too grew up during the 1990s...but I have never even heard about such a thing as a "pity kitty" being "cool" during that time. As I was reading your post I kept thinking "what on earth?" I'm guessing maybe it was ok to be that where ever YOU grew up, but not for everyone back then. I didn't even know there was such a thing. That's horrible. So with that said, I will just answer your question, no I have never experienced that in my life. The thought of people actually bragging about their problems, that is strange. And I don't mean in a magical, whimsy kind of strange :(

Like, Hi, Fer Shurr,

Hey, MaxwellSmart!  The Pity Kitties that I knew were all girls; if being a Pity Kitty was a GUY thing, TOO, then...oooh, brother...because there were enough female Pity Kitties back then to last somebody a lifetime.

Hey, amjikloviet!  Thank you for the sympathy; there's not much that CAN be said, except that I ended up saying "That must be how MOST girls/ women behave."  ACK!  It's actually interesting to know that not EVERYBODY was up to their eyebrows in THAT scene back then.

I'm curious to know, though, weather or not you grew up in a city or not, because I grew up in a sort of small town.  I wonder if one's geographic location made a difference...
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Like, Hi, Fer Shurr,

I'm curious to know, though, weather or not you grew up in a city or not, because I grew up in a sort of small town.  I wonder if one's geographic location made a difference...
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Maybe it did have something to do with locations. I grew up in a city area mostly.

Valley Goth and Bill the Cat say "ACK!"
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