Guilt
I started this post almost two weeks ago when Claire and I were on holiday in Italy. I was having a bit of a ropey early morning, where anxiety had kept me awake, so I dragged myself out of bed and tried to think about what was going on and whether I could exorcise it with a wee bit of writing.
My dad was very ill, and his prognosis not good. I went to see him before we flew and while he was obviously not doing great, the hospital had deemed him well enough to go home. I picked him up, took him back, spent a bit of time with him and then headed home to pack. He looked better than he had done for some time, and while I felt a little pang of guilt for gallivanting off, he’d be there when I got back.
That was the last time I saw him. In the early hours of last Sunday morning, my brother rang me to say he’d been rushed into hospital on Saturday night, and despite looking much better for being there, he’d died in the night of a heart attack and a pulmonary embolism, brought on by lung cancer.
I’d been meaning to finish this piece on the aeroplane on the way home, but I haven’t had the time or the head space to pick it back up. The tone has changed somewhat, but the message is the same.
There’s a lot of talk of guilt in the news right now. Is Trump guilty of asking a foreign power to intervene in domestic politics (does the Pope shit in the woods…)? Is Johnson guilty of handing out government funds to a mediocre entrepreneur in the hopes of getting his shrivelled end away (if the penis-pump fits…)? Is the Labour party guilty of failing to eradicate institutional antisemitism in its ranks (there’s no joke to be made here). Et cetera, et cetera.
This is guilt in terms of culpability though. From the outside, can it be found that these individuals or groups are responsible for the actions that we accuse them of? There is, of course, another meaning for guilt. This one is more of an internal sense, that sense of personal responsibility for an action, and the associated regret, and sometimes the drive to make amends for that action. That might mean the guilt felt over eating the last Magnum from the freezer, even knowing that you’ve already had more than your partner, or it might mean the guilt felt at not attending that really important thing your friend was arranging because you can’t face seeing other people today. It may also be something way more serious.
Guilt as an emotion pretty much defines my life. For as long ago as I can remember it has been with me in some form or other.
I remember complaining one day to my late nan that I had been having trouble sleeping. She asked me if there was something I was worried about. Despite the fact that I was maybe six at this point, I remember the conversation really clearly.
The day before, I had been playing in the playground of my infant school, with my best friend, David McCarthy. Your guess is as good as mine over what we’d been playing. Probably something to do with the A-Team. Anyway, there was an incident – I can’t remember what precisely, this was over thirty years ago – involving the evil twins, Kevin and Anthony. They had somehow usurped me as David’s best friend in that moment. They had this shrewd double act, where they’d trick you into doing something naughty and get you into trouble with ‘Miss’. However they’d done it, they’d manipulated David into saying he wasn’t my friend any more, and probably something else that a six-year-old would find offensive.
I can’t remember my initial reaction, but we ended up having an argument, and I pushed David really hard. He fell on his arse and, in the spirit of six-year-olds across the globe, began to cry. In my head, I remember it being a ludicrously powerful shove that sent him back ten feet in a sprawling cloud of dust. I doubt it was.
David hadn’t talked to me for the rest of the day. At a guess, this lasted precisely one day, before we were back to deciding who got to be B.A. Barracus. It was probably over a Bank Holiday weekend though as it seemed like forever. My best friend had betrayed me, and my first reaction was to lash out and hurt him. It affected me enough to keep me awake at night.
I told my nan that I wasn’t worried about anything and that was that. It wasn’t true though. I felt mortified that I’d lashed out and hurt my friend. It’s probably very telling that over thirty years later I still dwell on it. I doubt very much that anyone else involved remembers it even faintly. I don’t know David any more, so I can’t ask him. I can’t remember precisely when or why, but David stopped going to our school not long after, as he and his family emigrated to Australia, and I was left to battle the evil twins alone.
I find it horrible to think that my nephew, who is about to turn six, could end up feeling these complex emotions. I hope very deeply that he feels like – should something like this ever happen to him – that he can talk to someone about it. For whatever reason, I didn’t feel like I could talk to my nan, or even my mom about it. I imagine I thought I’d get in trouble.
Another reason, is that I had no outlet for these emotions. I’d never witnessed or experienced anyone in my life talking about guilt. I doubt I really knew what it meant then, and it’s only with hindsight that I can recognise it now. I can be absolutely sure of one thing though, I’d never seen my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or anyone I knew talk about things like guilt, or really any emotion that wasn’t simply joy or anger.
I feel profoundly guilty that I didn’t spend more time with my grandparents before they died. The same with my dad. I don’t think I knew him very well at all. For all his stoicism and ‘manliness’, he was a gentle soul and very sentimental. He was much closer to my mom’s parents than I realised, and their deaths really affected him. His mood very much dipped when my nan died. I saw it and absolutely meant to try and break down the barrier we had and talk to him. I failed.
There’s a particular artefact of my failure that adds to the guilt of all of this staring at me right now. When my nan died and we cleared her house, I rescues my granddad’s old cribbage board. I’ve been meaning to take it round and give my dad a game since she died, years ago. Next time I went to see dad at hospital, I was going to take it with me and play with him. Some of my fondest memories are of my dad, my uncle Geoff, granddad, and sometimes my great uncle Harry sitting for hours in the dining room at family stuff playing all sorts of archaic card games for pennies. Eventually, when I was older, I used to play as well. Since granddad died, we haven’t done that. I wanted to restart the tradition, but never got round to it. Something else to be guilty about.
But it’s not just the huge things like this that debilitate my days. In fact, it’s probably the smaller things that contribute most to my anxiety. I think people with empathy are supposed to feel guilt at things they know they could have done something about and didn’t. It’s part of being human. In any given day though, I might decide I can’t be bothered to cook for example. So what eh? What happens though, albeit subconsciously, is that I have thus transgressed from my sacred duty as kitchen wangler. I have adopted the cooking and cleaning of the kitchen as my calling, and if I fail to perform the task of cooking from scratch then I have torpedoed my raison d’être and should be forsaken as an adult. What generally happens of course is that Claire shrugs and we chuck in some pasta. It grinds against my hindbrain for far too long though.
That and the guilt of not taking the dog for a walk in the morning, because I’m ill and should be resting, then not washing up last night’s dishes, not fixing mom’s toilet and letting my uncle do it, not taking out the recycling, not putting the outdoor lights on the steps outside the house despite the nights drawing in and it being a potential death-trap, et cetera ad infinitum.
It’s exhausting to read back that last paragraph, but that’s today for example.
My therapist says that I use the words ‘should’ and ‘must’ too much in my vocabulary when talking about myself, but very rarely when I talk about other people. I don’t know where this came from, but I suspect it was my mom. She does precisely the same. When you combine that with the executive function problems I have – in short an overwhelming obstacle sits in front of every task I need to do, which often prevents me from starting – and the ADHD-like symptoms (undiagnosed currently) which then war against the executive function and demand that I always be doing something, every day becomes a struggle to some extent.
I’m working hard on my attitude towards the must/should thing, and I have every intention of talking to my GP, once the dust of dad’s death has settled, about my concerns around ADHD. It’s a huge habit to break out of after thirty-eight years though. I shouldn’t be feeling guilt about most of these things. I hate upsetting people, and I hate having other people be put-out, when I can step in and take on that burden and that’s where a lot of this stuff comes from.
Remember, you need to put your own oxygen mask on before you try and help anyone else, otherwise you’ll both suffocate.