Is it normal to feel guilty about everything?
Don't click on this if you aren't in the mood for moan-y introspectiveness that borders on self-obsession
No matter what I’m doing; whether I’m having fun or feeling unwell, being productive or lazing around, my body thrums with a baseline feeling of guilt. Sometimes, the feeling is unbearable and sometimes the feeling is small, but it’s always there, even if it isn’t connected to anything specific. It is an intensely unproductive feeling; it doesn’t inspire me to do do or fix anything in the way that emotions like anger or jealousy often does; I find myself unable to transform the feeling into action and use it for good; it just makes me feel like shit.
Recently, I decided to embark on a thought-quest to figure out where this feeling came from and hopefully come up with some ways to fix it. As for the origination: I have some hunches. The first one is life experience. I’ve been chronically unwell since I was in my early teens, plagued by the kinds of conditions that are difficult to see and diagnose. Because of this, there was a lot of gaslighting (some from myself, some from others); there was a lot of ‘maybe you’re just lazy’ and ‘have you tried exercise’ and ‘I think she’s faking it’. I felt so guilty for being sick and complicated; for being a difficult daughter and friend, for faking my symptoms - even though I wasn’t! Medical gaslighting is a trip; I was being given information about my own body that did not match my experience, but since that information was being delivered by an authority figure I had always been told to respect, I believed them. This guilt did not go away with my diagnoses, there was no vindicating ‘I was right’ moment. I felt sad that I hadn’t been brave enough to believe in myself and my own body, and I mourned the version of my life that I could have had if I had been listened to and treated with kindness. I still feel constantly guilty about the way I live as a chronically ill person; I feel guilty when I push past my limits, I feel guilty when I have a flare up, I feel guilty when I fail to acknowledge how lucky I have been to have been diagnosed with anything at all; to be able to work flexibly and live as well as I do.
Another factor that feeds into my pathological guilt complex is gender, sorry! Guilt is a woman’s game; we’re socialised from a young age to feel like we’re responsible for other people’s feelings; that our duty as women is to carry other people’s emotional burdens and compartmentalise our own. I’m rolling my eyes as I write this; I’ve read my gender theory, I’ve done the work. I’ve known this information for a long time and part of me feels like I should have figured out how to reverse the brainwashing by now. I always forget that knowledge isn’t the same as power (sorry Francis Bacon!) or action. Research and reading isn’t enough to banish the pitfalls of my socialised gender. My mother is also a chronically guilty person, so you could say I learned it from her. She feels guilty when her energy is low or when she feels like she has been unproductive. My mother, the busiest woman I know! My mother, the person who spends all of her time helping other people! My mother who moved my grandpa to her village and looked after him full-time for two years before he died! My mother who cooked Christmas dinner for six people whilst she was crippled with the flu and was too unwell to eat any of it! This mindset rubbed off on me in ways that are both good and bad: my ambition and high-standards for myself and others comes from my mum; my attempts at morality and goodness can be attributed to her, but so can the feeling that I’m never doing enough.1
Midway through my introspection-journey, I read All Fours2 by Miranda July, which was predictably incredible and is 99p on Kindle this month if you’ve been planning on picking it up. Reading it was incredibly transformative; the kind of reading that feels like a full-bodied experience instead of a passive occurrence. The narrative felt unbelievably relatable even though the backdrop of the narrators life was wildly different to my own and I found myself equal parts admiring and judging this woman who decided to prioritise her own pleasure above stability and pleasing others. Throughout the novel the narrator asks her female friends about various life stages; menopause, marriage etc. and one of these exchanges really spoke to me.
“Why should I be ashamed about what I want? Shame says: ‘I’m bad.’ I’m not bad.” She was training to be a therapist; this sounded like something from one of her classes.
“I really am bad,” I said.
“I wonder who taught you that?”
This exchange stopped me in my tracks for two reasons. First of all, it made me realise that I had been mistaking my constant negative feeling for guilt when it was actually, often, shame. “Shame says: ‘I’m bad.’” Woof. I felt called out.
Guilt is a negative response that relates to a specific instance: I feel guilty I forgot my friends birthday or I feel guilty that I promised to do this thing but I didn’t.3 Shame is different. Shame is an inherent believe that you are bad; that there is something wrong with you. It’s an overwhelming sense that nothing you ever do will be enough; that your very wants and urges are flawed and wrong. I am a person who prides themself (is this even a word? myself, oneself?) on being self aware but I had been misidentifying a core emotion for a long time. The second realisation was that internalising shame as a core part of you can make you very self-absorbed. This is what the narrator does above, this immediate response of, well you aren’t bad but I am.
I have always believed, on some level, that I’m different from other people; inherently less deserving of compassion and grace than my friends and loved ones. I find it easy to write off other peoples mistakes and slights as expected and human, but the rules are different for me. How arrogant is that? This idea that I’m flawed in some unique way, that I’m not entitled to the same level of kindness that I believe is owed to everyone else in the world? Pathological shame is, for me, connected to the delusion that everyone else is always looking at me and watching for me to fuck up. I have a tendency to become so introspective that I lose the ability to look outside of myself (a tendency that is not helped by being a work from home writer I will tell you that for free), and this often causes me to become overwhelmed and paralysed by self-criticism. And then I don’t do anything. And then I feel worse. Sometimes I feel like every Substack I write about some niche emotional response comes back to this same idea, and the obvious antidote is also the same every-time. Living! Getting out of my own head! Stephen King said that: "Art is a support system for life, not the other way around." I’m aware of the irony of writing these words down at the end of a long moany essay about my own perceived shortcomings, but there’s only so many times you can say these things kind of things out loud before your friends get bored of you.
None of this is your fault, mum!!!! I know you’re reading this. Love you
I will be writing about this book more in a later post because it was awe-inspiring!!!! And also, quickly, how brilliant is it that good fiction can cause these huge self-reckoning moments that genuinely re-wire the way we think and function? Thank you to Miranda July. Thank you to fiction <3
Dw I still feel this kind of guilt loads :)