Go Ahead, Pick Your Poison
The other night I rushed through my nighttime routine to get into bed on time. “If I’m in bed by 10:30 pm, and asleep by 11:00 pm, I’ll get get 8 hours of sleep if I wake up at 7:00 am.” This calculation soothes me. It’s as though this ritual frees my mind from a sense of guilt; the guilt of letting myself down.
I’ve grown familiar with guilt over the years.
When I think about the guilt, I think about the feeling of disappointing those I love. Life gets in the way and I forget to return texts. Time gets in the way and I no longer have the emotional capacity to return calls. Days pass. Weeks pass. And suddenly I’m hit with a two-pronged force of guilt: the guilt from not returning said calls or texts as promised and the new found guilt from not wanting to.
But I also think about guilt’s mobilizing effect. Regardless of whether I fight or freeze, I’m caught in the eye of an internal dual between what I want and what I should. It’s a quartering kind of feeling, more logically described as splitting, though there’s little need to tie its illogical reasoning to form or substance—this heavy grey shadow will end up on my shoulder eventually. And when it comes, its presence fills the void left by its unfamiliar absence.
On a cold winter night in New York City, I shared my internal guilt cycle with J.
“I feel so guilty,” I started, followed by an audible sigh. “It’s like I can’t live up to her standards.”
He nodded in agreement. He understood my quarrel; he’d seen this play out.
“Where does this guilt come from?” He asked. “Is it the guilt of not living up to her standard or is it the guilt of not wanting to?”
“Because,” he continued, “there’s a big difference between the two.”
I paused in reflection.
The guilt of not living up to someone’s standard is a self-imposed kind of guilt. The guilt we’ve been conditioned to absorb in order to meet the needs, hopes, and dreams of someone else. The threat of failure trails close behind, threatening to close in at any waking moment. The other kind of guilt is slightly more nuanced. The guilt of not wanting to meet someone’s standard is surely a product of social conditioning. We’re taught from a young age that to protect the needs of the self is fundamentally a selfish pursuit. But by putting others' needs ahead of our own, we harm the self. While disguised under the cloak of empathy, this wrongful response does little more than to positively reinforce bad behaviour.
You see, when people expect others to bend to their needs, they deploy an unreasonable standard which can only culminate in dissatisfaction. The bender subconsciously perpetuates their needs, upping the ante of this vicious cycle as their active drive to meet the needs and wants of another only encourages this person; they first need this, and now they need that. One need morphs into another. The brain is hardwired to interpret attention as a good thing. It's as motivating as it is addictive. I mean, what's this person to do when the curtain falls and the attention pool dries up?
Those who continue to meet the standard are seen as superior, selfless individuals while those who fail are deemed inadequate and selfish caregivers. But the former isn't really selflessness, is it? It may well be described as an understandable response to manipulative behaviour that harnesses the ramifying potential of guilt.
“I feel guilty,” my friend revealed to me the other day. Her statement was followed by an audible exhale. “Everything’s become so heavy.”
I nodded in agreement.
She didn’t have to go into detail; I knew the cause of her guilt because I felt it too. I feel it too. We share the same cause of guilt though we’ve seldom discussed it in fear of appearing selfishly self-involved at worst, and incompetent or unable to address the needs of others at best. Pick your poison, I like to say. Either will bring you to your knees eventually.
But what if guilt, in this fickle context, isn’t actually guilt. What if it’s the body’s way of reminding you that you, indeed, have needs. You have a life, a love, a job, and a complex checklist of things that must be done each day. Of course, there are times when the needs of others will take importance over the needs of the self, though this should be infrequent and appreciated accordingly. The challenge is when someone expects their needs to take primary importance in the lives of others. And to this I can only say that the needs of others need not take importance over the needs of the self.
Put frankly, if you’re not going to look out for you, who will?