And To Prove It I'm Here

Hey! Yes, it’s me. I have returned. It’s been a weird couple of weeks, actually - there’s been death and despair and also moments of joy and excitement personally speaking. I am probably not very well designed for a regular newsletter, because whenever I don’t have something INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT to say, I feel guilty about writing anything at all. But then, I do suffer from the conviction that being a writer is a very unimportant thing to do. I actually think a lot of writers would benefit greatly from sharing that conviction, but it’s an incompatible one when placed against my equally strong conviction that I want people to pay attention to me and tell me I’m good.

Remember when Bart Simpson says to Luann van Houten, “Tell me I’m good”? I feel that, man. I feel that so much.

Of course I could write at length about how I think that writers should stop writing about writing so much, but that is, to put it mildly, completely up itself. Instead, let me muse on guilt.

Guilt is not a useless appendix of an emotion. We need to know what guilt feels like, because so much of what we do that is good is at least partly motivated by the desire to feel it as seldom as possible.

Sometimes guilt is described as “gnawing”. I think that’s terribly apt. It eats away at you, keeping you in a state of constant discomfort until it dissipates.

Unless it doesn’t.

Guilt can be temporary, permanent or recurring. Just like that disease. You know the one, right? Guilt is a disease, too: you catch it from yourself.

I don’t know how other people feel (kind of squishy?). We never really know. So I don’t know whether other people experience guilt like I do, but from my casual observations I think a lot of them do. We tend to feel guilt over the silliest things. Why, for example, should I feel guilty that I have not yet unpacked all the boxes from my move? It doesn’t hurt anyone, and it doesn’t even get in my way, since I live alone and I have a whole room to keep boxes in that doesn’t inconvenience me at all. I’ll get to them when I get to them, right?

Well I might. And mostly I think that’s fine. But sometimes I think no, that’s not fine. Because other people don’t do that. I don’t KNOW that other people don’t do that, but somewhere deep inside me is the idea that out there are people who unpack all their boxes within a week of moving in, have no rooms full of boxes, and settle into domestic life absolutely seamlessly. These people probably never leave dishes in the sink overnight either, I reckon.

Even now, I’m writing this at 4am and I’m feeling guilty, because you’re not supposed to be awake at 4am. Except who cares if you are? Nobody, really. But you’re not supposed to, are you?

Then there’s the guilt which theoretically is justified, but really has no basis. Like when you feel guilty for saying something to a friend that later you think might’ve upset them, and actually it didn’t upset them and they never thought about it at all, but you feel so guilty that you apologise and they tell you there’s no need to apologise and you are grateful but also think they’re probably just being nice.

That kind of thing can sour an entire friendship, purely on the basis of wild imagination. Guilt latches onto whatever it can find, and it doesn’t need much.

But sometimes guilt is entirely justified. Because sometimes we really do do awful things, and sometimes we do hurt people, and sometimes we need to feel guilty about that. Because generally only by experiencing guilt will we be inspired to try to make amends for what we’ve done wrong. If you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, you’re not very likely to try to make it right.

Sometimes a simple apology is all that’s needed to relieve the burden of guilt. Sometimes you need to take further action, like fixing a broken window or paying for your illegitimate child’s schooling. Sometimes you don’t actually need to spend twenty years building affordable housing in Cambodia, but it really does help the conscience.

And sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes there’s nobody to apologise to for the thing you did. Sometimes there is, but they won’t listen to your apology, or won’t accept it. Sometimes what you did is just so awful that even if you do everything possible to assuage your guilt, it will sit with you forever.

So what do you do then?

I’ll let you know when I find out.

(I promise I’ll keep the posting up. I may not be cut out for a regular newsletter, but I want to be, so I’m going to grit my teeth and push through. Otherwise, I’d feel horribly guilty. So next week, EXPECT ME. Roight?)