Welcome! Today the guilt eats me alive, so I’m going to get so overly personal it’s going to be awful, and you’re all going to hate me afterwards. Let’s get to it!
We do what we must, even if we don’t want to. We don’t technically have to, but it’s the right thing to do. And I assume that’s what drives most people; it’s definitely what drives me to do the vast majority of shit I do. Even more so, not to do the shit that I don’t do. That’s what impresses me. I think I’m impressed that I don’t do some of the shit I really want to because I think I’m already a moral failure; what’s a little more guilt? My brain has told me forever, as long as I can remember, that I am to feel guilty about merely existing. I’m not even sure if that’s a child of a neglectful parent thing or a generationally traumatized Catholicism thing. Like, it could be either. Or both. Probably both. But anyway, I logically know I’m not a bad person. Like, the shit I do that I think makes me a bad person is shit some people don’t think twice about; they don’t even think once about it in some cases. I pray for forgiveness when I toss a cigarette butt out the window. When I see a homeless person, and I can’t give them money on account of the fact that I myself should technically be homeless with my “income”, I avert my eyes, and I feel the biggest, heaviest, most burdensome guilt. It pangs me in my gut, and I sometimes feel like I should be flagellated right there in the town square. When I think of how I’ve lied to my mother during active addiction, I get a little pukey. I can’t think about the time I stood some weird guy up at a bar without crying. And that’s one of the biggest ones. Everyone in the world could tell me that I did the right thing, but in my eyes, that is my ultimate biggest fuck up. I feel this so deeply; it causes me physical aches and random pains when I think about it. I don’t know how I can ever repay my karmic debt when it feels like I don’t even have a source of karmic income. That’s straight up a lie, though. I am karmically wealthy. Despite this, I feel that I am more guilt than flesh at this point. It never goes away, either. I’ve had worse done to me, but that does not give me the right to do half unto this poor guy.
I mean, while we’re spilling the ultimate beans, I have another horrific, awful, immoral one to get off my chest from when I was 18. Once I was at a friend’s house, and I had taken some Ativan because this friend was a shitty fucking driver and we almost died. Ativan, in all honesty, does horrible, horrible things to me. Not just physically, but apparently mentally as well. Anyway, my friend, who was trans and visibly so, and I were sitting outside, me trying with all my might to relax, when a group of boys in their early teens pulled up and started calling my friend the f-slur and telling them to pull down their pants. So, me, in all my glazed-out glory, went down to the street. I was like, “Yo, you’re young, but you’re not so young that you don’t know the impact of that word. I’d like you to apologize to my friend.” He, probably thinking I wasn’t about to fight a 14-year-old, goes, “What’re you going to do about it? Tell my mom?” Turns out, when you’re on Ativan, you’ll absolutely fight a 14-year-old. Then, he’ll tell his mom, and she’ll call the cops. Then the cops will come, you will have to explain that this child was saying slurs at a trans person (to which the cop replies, “well why didn’t you call the cops when that was happening?”), and then they’ll talk to the mom again who, when hearing about the situation, will decide to not press charges, hallelujah. So yeah, about a year later I stopped taking Ativan because I almost got arrested and then started forming horrific hangover-like symptoms every time I took it. They were symptoms that even when I was hungover, I didn’t experience. The light sensitivity thing was bonkers, dude. That’s never happened to me before. I mean, it actually happens all the time because my eyes are blue, but that was intense.
Anyway. My point here is that people have done so much worse than I have or will ever do. The issue is that I would never treat the scum of the earth as harshly and terrorize them as fervently as I do to myself. On the other side of things, because I feel so naturally guilty, and I’ve become good at acknowledging adequate times to feel adequate levels of guilt, I can spot things I genuinely shouldn’t feel guilty about. After this entire post, I’m sure some of you may think otherwise, but hear me out. I may feel guilty as shit for breathing, but I do know my worth as a human who has been put in the situation of living and breathing. I may feel guilty, but I’d rather not wallow in it. I do shit about my guilt when and where I can.
Anyways. Thank you for… uh… reading about all the awful sins I’ve committed? And I’m sorry if you thought I was cool before all this. That one’s honestly on you, though. Peace out, be good to each other, don’t stand up people at bars even if they’re a little weird. Love you.
Phrenectomy 