Learning to Live with Guilt

The leaky guilt tap

I have always been my mother’s number one confidant.  When Mum needed an ear to listen, often that ear belonged to me.  Most of what my mother relayed to me I was able to make sense of in my young mind.  She was frustrated by the skittishness of the underprivileged kids.  I imagined her being splattered by a wayward spitball and cringed.  She wished she and Dad could find common ground when it came to the vegetable ratio of the evening meal; and I knew nutrition was important.  She felt guilty, always guilty, and for what?  Well, for just about everything.  Guilt.  This is where my understanding of what troubled my mother met its limits.  I could not in all my searchings fathom why Mum felt guilty.  How could someone feel guilty, an emotion I saw as indexed directly to a particular event, for wishy washy, indefinable reasons?  To me it made no sense, you had to be guilty about something, and a general unease about the way one was executing one’s obligations did not qualify.          

Fast forward twenty years and here I am, typing this and trying to ignore the guilt that’s nagging at me, biting at my insides.  It creeps up on you, doesn’t it?  Popping its head up here and there masquerading in legitimacy until one day you realise that you’ve been unceremoniously saddled with a life partner.  For me it started as a drug thing, and is in fact one of the main reasons I decided to wave goodbye to the giddy pleasures of the weekend pill-pop.  I would emerge from the blur of euphoria with a head full of desperate questions.  Did I make a fool of myself?  Should I have spent more time nursing Amy, who had spent the majority of the night attached to the First Floor toilet bowl?  Why did I even take ecstasy in the first place?  My brain, deprived of the placating effects of serotonin, would confound these usually benign worries into an unbearable shit-storm, and I would conclude that I had failed.  And with the failure came guilt.

The next day, with sleep and perspective on my side, I would regain my ability to see the bigger picture.  The guilt would fade away and I would move on.  It was when it started to make its presence felt on other occasions that I realised, aghast, what was going on.  As my mother entered that lovely time in life when hormones settle down and wisdom breeds relief, I was reluctantly taking my place in the long line of guilty Pershall women.

I spent so many years engaged in complicated and exhausting battles.  I believed the voice in my head, the voice that told me I was the problem.  That I wasn’t a very good friend, because I had lambasted Helinka for failing to take charge on our European trip.  That I wasn’t a good enough sister, because I had years ago ignored the needs of my younger admirer, excluding her from my visiting harem.  The only way to absolve myself, I believed, was to unpick the tangle of wrongdoings that nested in the corners of my mind and fix them, one by one.  I became a routine apologizer.  But I couldn’t gain any headway.  There was always something else. 

It was when I sought help for my anxiety that I began to understand my mind.  It was difficult for me to believe the psychologist when she suggested that the guilt was its own monster; that it would be there no matter how many apologies I offered.  My chest tightened and I felt trapped.  I wanted to believe that there was a solution.  Depression threatened as I struggled to accept that there was nothing I could do.

I talked to Helinka.  She said she always felt awful about her mother, that maybe she could be doing better.  Hearing my fears articulated by my friend, I felt a rush of relief.  I decided to try a different approach. 

I told the guilt I wasn’t afraid of it anymore.  I reassured myself that I was doing the best I could, and that mistakes happen to everyone.  Instead of scrambling to ‘fix’ the guilt, I endeavoured to make peace with it.  I gave myself permission to feel it, but to know that it wasn’t justified.  Gradually, it began to lose its bite. 

I’m proud of where I am now.  I can see that objectively, I’m living a good life.  That thoughts are just thoughts, feelings just feelings, and that just because it crossed my mind, doesn’t make it true.  I’ve learnt that for some reason my brain produces that guilty feeling, day after day in intermittent little squirts.  I can’t always turn the tap off, but I know now that the guilt is the product of a malfunctioning, leaky tap.  Not a horrible, insensitive person.  I can get on with my life. 

I hate to think of my mother and hers struggling, living every day with an ugly, mean voice intent on wrecking their self-belief.  I know that, for my grandmother especially, the guilt ate away at her, caused so much pain that she could not contain it within herself, and would explode, a spray of viperous, nasty words aimed at whomever was unlucky enough to be near her.  It seems to me to be a woman problem.  We punish ourselves so readily, our own worst enemies.

I hope that the other women out there who’ve found themselves entangled in guilt’s webs can also break free, like I have.