For a time, I thought disappointment was the most painful emotion, it is unpleasant for sure, but I have closed in on something worse in the past couple of months, guilt. The Gift of Guilt might be one of my favourite songs of all times, I’d rather get anything other than guilt as a gift. No gift at all works just fine.
Let’s get cliché and get over it fast. My father was an asshole, still is but not my problem anymore, and he didn’t need to abuse me or beat me to destroy my self-esteem over 30 years ago. Being scared of a parent and knowing you can never be or even appear right, whatever you say or do probably leads to dark places where life seems like a bucket of lies.
Fast forward to the present and after 20 years of therapy, there might still be some remains of the past here and there, and guilt might be one of them. I am well aware that guilt isn’t just bad, I’d like my father to feel some (or maybe a lot). For example, he abandoned three young kids and a wife for my mother without looking back, and and fed my mother lies when he swore he was not with the wife anymore. Maybe he does. I doubt it.
So guilt is a legitimate emotion that one feels when one does something that is not right. Fine. My problem is not with the emotion itself, but with my incapacity to let it go afterwards, when the dust (should) have settled. Some just admit their wrong, say they are sorry, and whatever comes after, and just go on with their lives. Some others do crappy stuff, put the blame on something or someone else, believe their own story, and then move on. My father once drew on the tablecloth. There was not a doubt in my mind he had done it, I would have recognize his insecure little lines between a thousand sketches. When I asked him “why did you draw on the tablecloth?” he replied, “I didn’t, you did.” Because I always did reply, there was some kind of back and forth but I eventually stopped, because he could get threatening and scary. Even if it wasn’t me, and there was no one else in our crappy apartment because my mother was working, he put the blame on a 10-year-old kid because come on, adult males don’t draw on the tablecloth with a pen, and kids do. That may sound mild, but it’s one of my older memories of feeling guilt for a thing I hadn’t done. At the time, I thought I would get in trouble. He transferred it on me, and I made it bigger than it needed be. Believe me, I try to never do that to anyone around. I still sometimes take guilt for others because I know it hurts and I cannot let them suffer. Spoiler alert, it’s not a sustainable journey.
Decades of people putting guilt on me led to me being unable to manage it. Today, I fucked up. My son had an appointment with a therapist student to help him in his studies, and I didn’t go. When he called and I realized my mistake, I screamed “OH NO, I FORGOT YOU!” and I started apologizing while trying to blame… something. COVID ended up taking the blame, and yes, the last few days have been quite hard because I had a final exam to prepare, with a COVID jelly brain, and finally couldn’t attend because I couldn’t drive so far with a fever, and I have been distracted and out of breathe, and blah blah blah and the true reason is that I didn’t check my schedule properly and I just forgot.
After apologizing for the fifth time, I said “I’ll apologize one last time”, and then did it a few more times, and I felt so terrible because I had let some people down and I was disgusted by my lack of rigour. The guy was super nice and accepted my first apology, and we rescheduled. Now, I cannot let go, and I want to. Yes, I look unreliable, yes, I wasted their time, yes, I let my son down as well, because he was disappointed. But there is nothing more to it, yet I feel like a complete failure. Sometimes, when I hear a cheesy therapist talking about childhood traumas on every little thing people have to get through, I get pissed, because there are kids out there that go through real trauma. But this shit is real, my parents really did break me by unloading their guilt (and other unprocessed emotions) on me. For that, I am not grateful.
To conclude, there seems to be something broken in my GPC, guilt processing centre, and I really wish I could fix it. Telling me to let go won’t do it, clearly, and I will attack on that front next time I see my therapist. Until then, I highly encourage you to check the song Gift of Guilt by Gojira, an amazing heavy metal band from France.