Guilt is my Middle Name

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I’m sorry this is late. I got caught in one of those computer quicksand storms where every time I correct a mistake six more appear. Now I could have published it on time with mistakes, but I am too proud.

Guilt is My Middle Name

I feel guilty about so many things! Sometimes I feel that if there is a word for something, I feel guilty about it.

Now I know that I can’t possibly do that many things to feel guilty about in a day. Therefore it must be a “feeling” flashback to one of the innumerable times I was told as a child that it was my fault, that I was bad for doing or saying or thinking such things, that I should be ashamed of myself. Those messages were repeated so often that they coalesced into a basic belief about myself. I’ve known for decades that it’s hooey, but the feelings still flood over me.

Here’s what inspired me to write about guilt. For the last few days I have been upset by something I wrote in the last post. What popped into my mind was “OMG, I lied. I wrote something that wasn’t true. What should I do? Say nothing, and hope nobody notices? Confess and apologize? Or just explain?” I’m choosing to explain.

See if you can spot the lie – um, inaccuracy – in this paragraph. I don’t imagine you can.

“My horse’s name was Badger. He was a beautiful dark brown, nicely proportioned, and very mellow. We rode on trails in the park, some paved, some dirt. There were native flowers in bloom and also “exotic” ones like climbing nasturtiums. There were stretches where I had to duck to avoid low-hanging branches. All we did was walk, but I didn’t care because I could pay closer attention to the plants and sunlight and the smell of the horses.”

But I know. I didn’t smell the horses because my sense of smell is going south. I no longer can smell flowers or cheeses or cat boxes. I also often smell things that aren’t there and most of the time I can’t identify the odor. It feels like something unpleasant that I have never smelled before. It’s all just a normal part of aging. <sigh>

All horses have a strong, distinctive smell, even when they have just been washed. I was around horses a lot when I was a kid, and I loved their smell and loved the way I smelled after I had hung out with them. These experiences were in the forefront of my mind when I wrote that paragraph and I came from that place, not the present.

Was it a lie? To me, a lie is something untrue said on purpose to protect oneself or deceive somebody else. So no, not a lie. A falsehood? Certainly. An error? Certainly. An inaccuracy? Certainly. Something to feel guilty about? Certainly not!

Guilt is such a big issue for me. I bet I could spent a whole year writing about it. But I have a short attention span, and luckily other things would catch my interest!

Guilt is My Middle Name

Bet all too many of you can relate!

Guilt seems to be my default setting.  I feel guilty about things that affect only me — that is, if they affect me at all. Like having a messy desk. Not making my bed every day. Doing nine reps of my physical therapy exercises instead of ten. Buying fresh produce instead of over-the-hill stuff on sale.  Not paying enough attention to the cats. Paying so much attention to the cats that I don’t get enough work done.

Then there is guilt about things that affect others. Having said something stupidly hurtful thirty years ago.  Having said stupid things all my live-long life. Giving away or losing something that meant something to another person. Not calling my kids often enough. Losing touch with my friends. Worrying others by not asking for help when I need it. Not having figured out earlier why I was depressed, since depressed people are not fun to be with and I therefore made others unhappy. Being too anxious to be able to be fully emotionally available, to babies, to kids, to adults, to animals.

And the environment. My carbon footprint is way too big. Instead of wetting myself, turning off the water, shampooing and soaping up, then quickly rinsing, I leave the shower on the whole time. I put a plastic bag that I could have washed and recycled into the trash.  I wasted water by washing plastic bags. The thermostat is set at 60 at night instead of 55. I don’t turn the computer off every night. I drive instead of taking public transportation. I fly to visit my kids and go places I really, really want to see. I’m not vegan. It goes on and on.

The Book of Common Prayer sums it up; “I have done those things I should not have done and left undone those things I should have done.” “I have sinned in thought, word, and deed, and there is no health in me.”

Now I have known for a long time that level of guilt is ridiculous. The burden of guilt I carry has nothing to do with the things I feel so guilty about. It comes from the past, from those evil times when I was made to feel everything was my fault and I was bad, guilty, shameful, evil through and through.

It’s not hard to make a little kid, three or four or five years old, believe anything you tell them. It’s all too easy to make them believe that they are so evil they can cause a thunderstorm and ruin a picnic, or make another kid fall down just by looking at him, or make an old person die. All sorts of bad things are your fault. And there is no way no way to fix things, no way to say you are sorry. You are stuck with the guilt of having done a really bad thing and that false belief is reinforced when you are punished for having done something evil you didn’t do in the first place. Add to that admonitions to not tell and not remember, and no wonder we carry forward so much guilt.

Once I figured out that whenever I felt guilty I was having a feeling-flashback, I could do something about it. I want to  point out that sometimes I really did do something that was against my moral code. It was fitting that I should feel guilty. But not that guilty! In that case, part was from the present and part from the past.

I decided that I would not longer do things I found immoral, like lie, cheat or steal. Not that I did them often, but sometimes I still did. By giving these behaviors up entirely, I could automatically assign all the guilt to the past. Of course, being human, I do slip, and then I have to sort past from present.

It took a lot of work to separate out thinking of something, saying it, and actually doing it. Thoughts, despite the fact that we were told they had magic powers, are just thoughts. If you think “I would like to wring his neck,” that person is just fine physically and remains oblivious to your feelings. If you say it out loud to him, you have to deal with his reaction, which may or may not be a good thing. But if you actually do it — well, you have committed murder. Big difference.

The biggest job was working through the source of the guilt in the first place. It usually was fairly easy to identify the trigger and it was a snap to recognize what feeling was being triggered, but what had they done to me to install that feeling? If the answer didn’t come in a flash, I would free-associate to the trigger, assuming I recognized it. Sometimes I could get the matching memory, but usually I found it could have been any one of dozens of things. No matter: the guilt still weakened, but not as spectacularly as when I got the exact memory. It was still well worth doing. Every time I do this, my guilt fades a little, and I am very grateful for that.

I’m not yet ready for a name change, but I am working on it.

Can an RA Survivor Take a Vacation?

I’m talking about me, of course.

Yes. No. Maybe. Depends.

Yes. There is no reason I can’t take a vacation just because I was horrendously mistreated as a kid. No. I am too scared and timid to go because I was horrendously mistreated as a kid. Maybe, if I do a good job of talking myself into being brave and fearless.  Depends on how well I plan the details and how thoroughly I prepare myself.

Can I take a vacation without feeling guilty? Are you kidding me??? I can’t do anything without feeling guilty! I’m going to make my cats unhappy. I’m going to use scarce resources and contribute to global warming. Don’t say everybody does it — that doesn’t make it right. Even if my carbon footprint were zero I would feel guilty that I wasn’t planting trees and making speeches 24/7. Guilt is just a given.

Nevertheless, I have made up my mind and I am going to do it. I’m sick of being confined to my apartment, sick of these four walls. And I need a break from my beloved computer, too. My writing seems stale to me and I haven’t filed anything in weeks, if not months. I want to once again be brimming with ideas and projects and energy and enthusiasm.

My best friend and I are going to Australia, my favorite country in the whole wide world, for two weeks. We are going to see lots and lots of desert because that’s my favorite part of Australia. About five years ago I was in Australia for two weeks with my daughter and grandkids and we spent three twelve-hour driving days going through the outback in a bus, mostly on unpaved roads. One night we stayed at a cattle ranch under millions of stars, and they had an illegal pet kangaroo named Mary. (Don’t ask me why they are illegal, they just are.) They fed her tea with milk and a slice of bread for breakfast and gave her a beer at dinner time. She held the cup in her little racoon-like hands. We won’t see Mary this time, but we will see lots of other things.

First stop is Coober Pedy, which is the opal capital of Australia, if not the world. They noticed that it was cool in the mines, so they dug holes and made houses inside them, and hotels and bars, too. Lots of bars; guess there isn’t a whole lot to do in Coober Pedy. The outback around Coober Pedy looks fantastic.

There will be no 36-hour bus trip this time, but there will be a 12-hour train ride from Adelaide to Melbourne through five hundred miles of beautiful nothing.  I just love trains.

Then, for contrast, there will be a week in Tasmania, which is very rainy. The outback — also called bush — there is lush and green and full of all sorts of birds and marsupials. If it is a clear night, you can see just as many stars as in Coober Pedy. The night sky will look totally different because it’s the Southern hemisphere and the constellations are all unfamiliar to me. I’m hoping to have a Tasmanian specialty for dinner one night: mudbugs. They are extremely large crawfish, quite edible. I’m also hoping to see a wombat, which is a short fat marsupial rodent the size of a small German Shepherd.

As you might have guessed, I’m pretty excited. This trip will be all the more precious because my back tells me this may be my last big adventure. I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like my spine is going to continue getting worse. The pain as well as the lack of mobility clips my wings considerably.

We won’t have access to the Internet, because what’s the point in going halfway around the world just to use a computer? So there will be a gap in this blog. I’ll miss the 10/30 entry, and I’m quite sure I will miss Halloween festivities, too (Hooray!) I plan on an 11/10 entry but it will be late.

Oh, and I promise to come back.