I live a life soaked with guilt. It's taken me years of self-discovery, therapy, meditation, writing, and honesty to reach this conclusion about myself. Turns out that my closest friends have known this about me for a long time; I failed to see it from their perspective for so long. On top of that, it's dawned on me that thousands of people can relate.
There have been many movements involving girl empowerment that shed light on the "apologizing" epidemic: most people don't realize how much they (myself included) apologize for stupid everyday shit that they don't need to say sorry for. But this post is my way of diving deeper into the reasoning behind my sorries.
I find that my anxiety or panic attacks stem from that feeling of being sorry, because I fester with the feelings long after anyone else does. But why?
Turns out I am guilty. I feel guilty over anything and everything.
I get invited to an outing with a group of friends and have to work or already have other plans, but I haven't seen that particular group of friends in so long. I feel bad the entire day and fail to stay in the present moment, even though it's not my fault.
My family now lives a bit far away and sometimes my little sister texts me about how much she misses me. I can't sleep that night because I feel horrible, like I'm failing at being a sister...even though it was out of my control that my family moved.
I have to do damage control for a customer at work regarding an incorrect cake order for their party, and she's devastated. I slip off to the bathroom to cry and deal with the feeling that I've ruined her baby shower...even though it's not something I did wrong.
I slowly pulled away from a friendship that I've been in for over 10 years because it was incredibly manipulative. That friend thinks I'm selfish and unreliable, and purposefully piled on the guilt because that friend knew (before I did) that guilt affects me so intensely... and even though I have a sense of peace without that toxic friendship now, I'm still engulfed with waves of shame over that decision.
I head out for dinner with a friend, and kiss my boyfriend Anthony goodbye before heading out. He says "I'll miss you so much!" I feel so bad for leaving him behind and consider cancelling the plans, even though he reassures me for ten minutes that there's nothing to feel sorry about.
A coworker asks me to trade shifts so she can go to a birthday party. I can't trade the shift because of my school schedule, but for the rest of the day I believe it's my fault that she'll miss the party.
I spill my water at a restaurant, and tears well up in my eyes as I help the waiter clean the mess; I know in his head he's so annoyed and I hate that I've created extra work for him.
This year I made a choice that was growing inside me for quite some time, and it was a decision that changed the course of my life. Since I'm a private person when it comes to my pain and these decisions, it seemed like a random and brash move to the world. This was seven months ago, but I still have panic attacks that come from the fear of knowing people out there think I'm an awful human for cutting ties with something that was no longer healthy for me, and that they judge me for working on an entirely different future for myself. Often I drown in the guilt of that decision until I nearly throw up, knowing I hurt people in the process. This life change has brought me on the journey to realizing just how guilty I always feel.
In my journal, I've made a few lists of what I feel guilty about on various days. Reading them back, the points fall into various categories that most people also experience, such as:
-Something that is out of my control. I already knew that a lot of my panic attacks come from feeling out of control in certain situations, but I didn't realize just how much. And let me tell you, it's a shit ton. It saddens me knowing that we obsess over things that are pointless; beating ourselves up over these things won't change the outcome, and there is nothing that we could've done about it. So why do we let it hurt us for so long?
-Thinking I hurt someone's feelings. If someone tells me I hurt them, that's one thing. But oftentimes I feel so bad over a tiny little thing that the other person has forgotten, yet I continue to turn it over and over in my head. The baffling part is that I stew over these thoughts with loved ones AND strangers.
-Genuinely hurting someone or doing something that angers others. This is a justifiable situation, but oftentimes I grow defensive when the other person tries to tell me that they're angry with me. In those moments I'm battling an intense internal dialogue; my brain is screaming "Cassie, you fucked up. You're horrible. You're stupid. You're careless." In response, I shut down the other person because I simply can't cope with more than what my thoughts are doing to me. But that is selfish in the sense that I'm not allowing the person that I hurt to find closure through me. On the flip side, I struggle with accepting that I cannot control other peoples' anger; other might be angry or upset or offended, and I might not necessarily agree. I do not need to hold the world's judgment and take it to heart.
I've been processing the "guilt" notion for years as I go through my mental healing, but it was only a few weeks ago when I started to make an important connection:
I feel guilty when I don't meet the expectations of other people.
I crumble when someone shares an opinion of me that is negative. I harbor their words, thinking "he/she is right." I believe it as a fact.
Why? Why do I let others affect me so much? Even co-workers or classmates or acquaintances that I rarely talk to?
There are still layers to this revelation that I'm peeling back, but the main root causes I've unearthed are:
Insecurity
Self-doubt
Lack of trust in myself
I don't know if you relate to this guilt diagnoses, but I can at least speak for myself when I say I'm TIRED of living this way. I am actually tired from it...physically, emotionally, spiritually. It is fucking exhausting living to please everyone around me, making sure I've done what they want, crying when they spit passive aggressive (or just straight-up aggressive) comments at me, giving all of my spare time to every demanding aspect of life, carrying resentment for myself, lacking the capacity to genuinely apologize for my actual mistakes, unconsciously allowing people to control me, not taking control of my thoughts and reactions, and most importantly: wholeheartedly creating an opinion of myself based on what everyone thinks of me.
Healing never completely ends; there are so many elements of trauma and self-sabotaging practices that I'm diving into. This article is fairly long so I'm going to share my healing process in a separate piece; this is only the breakthrough, the testimony that speaks what I've discovered that needs to change. I'd like to share the methods that that have been guiding me out of this tangle of webs. We CAN change our habits, we CAN shift our internal self-talk, we CAN establish new boundaries, we CAN choose how we react to life's shit, and we CAN stop giving a fuck about what the world thinks about us.
The guilt issue has been, and still is, extremely difficult to work through. But I'm trying, one day at a time.
*All pictures are my own