Guilt and shame are states that I have suffered with most of my life. They produce incredibly powerful feelings of having done something wrong, that can make other people appear as giant towering figures of authority in my head, whom I need to plead with for forgiveness so I can be free of any future condemnation.
I’m still not sure where it comes from, why I have such an exaggerated inner policeman, and friends get fed up of my constant apologising. But I apologise largely not for what I’ve done, but for what I fear I will end up doing.
I’ve always been haunted by this inner threat that I’m going to do/become something terrible, like I’m holding a heavy rock up on a steep hill, and as soon as let go it will collide down the hill, killing the village below. Preemptive apologies are my attempts at softening the blow for when the ‘Monster in me’ finally shows it’s face in public.
I say Monster, because this is something that a guilty soul worries that it will become.
Every age has its monsters. Today, they are plentiful, because, through our current dominant ways of communicating, which leave zero breathing space between the extreme black and white of a situation, we can no longer tell quite the difference between bad and really really bad. In turn, when we project another’s acts of injustice, it projects back on us an image of ourselves/our tribe as pure and free of any misdoings, whatsoever.
For for Guilty at Heart, feeling like they’re heading towards becoming a monster, social media is a horrible space, because you begin to identify with the ‘wrongdoers’, morally, criminally, sexually, racially, and think “I’m like that, that’s what I am”. Panicking, you think ” I need to do everything I can to stop myself becoming that!”.
But sometimes I fear that when we self-monsterise, we set the conditions for ourselves to become what the thing we fear. Because we are thinking about it all the time. Our inner policeman is constantly bringing us into the police station in our heads to interrogate us on crimes we fear we may commit. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”. You et day release because in flesh world, you haven’t yet done what they suggest you have….not yet.
It goes without saying that I believe this is a much larger societal phenomena, but I just wish I could pull a plug, press a halt button, and stop the self-monstering, and the fear that I am always one bad month away from it unleashing the worst in me.
In truth, I have done many things, many over the last few years, that I am deeply deeply regretful of, a lot of time through the state of drunkeness, which is something I still haven’t been able to stop using as an evening soul-crutch and relying on.
Also in truth, these regrets have probably been only harmful to me, and nobody else, even if they’ve made people less willing to spend time in my company. In fact I’m almost certain of this. But what prompts it is caused by the self-monsterising, which will not let me enjoy life and connect with people in ways I’d deem ‘healthy’ and constructive, because it tells me that once I reach out to touch, that’s when the terrible things might happen.
For some reason I grew up with a very fixed rigid idea of what a good person is, one that I find impossible to achieve, and in fact the guilt of not doing so often produces acts that are driven to destroy this ‘good person’ presentation of myself.
I don’t know what reading this sounds like. I’m not a closet murderer, serial sex offender, neo-nazi, or even a petty criminal, so no need to call the police. I have just decided to open up a little more on this blog, and see where it goes. And part of this means doing my best to escape the worsening affect that social media has had on this mental health condition.
John B Ledger 