Lately I’ve been feeling…a little uneasy. Something is stirring inside of me. Sometimes it feels like anger. Sometimes I feel shame. Sometimes I feel worthless. And today I was able to pinpoint what I feel: I feel good. And for that, I feel guilty.
Guilt is the emotion we feel when we believe we’ve done something wrong or bad—contrasted to shame which is the emotion that says we are wrong or bad.
I feel guilty because life is so freaking good for me! And it’s not for everybody. My old friends, my Vanilla friends, many of them have been unlucky in love, either remaining single or being with an imperfect fit. The burden of a noxious relationship is palpable, and, I feel guilty that sometimes it so soured them I didn’t want to hang out anymore. Others are happy in love but work grueling, demanding jobs that take too much or destroy their daily experience. Others lack money; others have money but lack sincere connections. Most lack purpose, and above all, lack the time and privilege to explore it, to explore themselves. I feel guilty that, despite my compassion for their circumstances, I stopped seeing most of them.
Not to mention my family. I don’t contact them. They can’t contact me. I haven’t explained why. I’m not sure if I ever will. I left them behind to pursue me.
Was it a bad deed to break so many ties? Can I reconcile the hurt I’ve caused? I feel guilty for putting me first. And I feel even worse that it worked. I’m happier than ever, more confident, self-assured, loving, and smiley. I glow. I wake up every day excited for another chance to be me, the me-ist me.
Why do I get this pleasure? What makes me worthy of all this time to pursue myself, my dreams, to live so well? I ask myself most days, can life really be this good?
In a way, it feels like a betrayal to abandon the rat-race and my friends still in it. It feels like I’m disloyal for relishing a loving relationship, not able to sympathize with the experience of hating one’s spouse. And sure, Mr. Honey and I have done a lot of things that have allowed us to feel good and live well, but I’m no fool: it’s mostly luck. It’s privilege.
But today I was reminded of my history. A history that always inspired me.
We were riding back from Hedonism II and our driver was telling us about slavery in Jamaica. The slavers were so brutal that they killed most of the indigenous people and then started shipping in Africans. Slavery ended, he told us, because of the violent rebellions carried out by slaves that made the British so fearful, slavery no longer seemed worth it. One of those rebellions was led by Nanny of the Maroons, “Jamaica’s only heroine, the fearless warrior. People said she possessed black magic because they believed she dodged bullets on the battlefield.” Another national hero was George William Gordon, a man who was mixed race–a child of a slave and her enslaver–and granted his freedom by his father at the age of ten. He advocated for change as a politician and was executed by the British for their suspicion that he planned the Morant Bay Rebellion.
Our driver explained that the children of slavers were part of the reason slavery ended too. The plantation owners would give those children preferential treatment and then these children “fought to free their people.”
There’s a logical leap there. Why would the children of slavers be so driven to fight for the freedom of other slaves?
Guilt.
The same was true for American Slaves, especially those who could pass. Those that could pass as White were some of the fiercest, most cunning activists for abolition. And those who received better treatment because of their lighter skin (for example, being allowed to work in the Big House, instead of the field), were also driven to become forces for change. They used their guilt. It pushed them to fight for more for everyone.
Today my tea-bag aphorism read: “Make your need be the need to help people.”
This is my answer.
I will use my privilege; I am using my privilege. Living so well, being so content, it shows me the injustice of the inequalities of experience all around us. How painful it is to remain sexually repressed. How despairing it is to face a looming sense that one’s humble dreams for a loving spouse or adventurous life will not be accomplished. How lonely it is to have no one, or just one or two people who embrace you fully and completely. I felt so strongly the former cell-bars on my experience, shrinking me, holding me down and back, it breaks my heart to know how many people are still locked up inside. And I want to break the chains. Now that I’ve broken mine, I can go back and break some more.
So today I’m grateful for the guilt. For the uncomfortable ick and stirring within me, that wants more for everybody just for the sake of fairness. This guilt is useful, and I will use it. I do not need to be assuaged of the guilt, I need to help.
I’ll leave you with a quote that moved me from a Hugo-winning short story by Roger Zelazny:
“Guilt has driven and damned the race of man since he days of its earliest rationality. I am convinced that it rides with all of us to our graves. I am a product of guilt—I see that you know that. It’s product, its subject, once its salve . . . But I have comes to terms with it, realizing at last that it is a necessary adjunct of my own measure of humanity. . . . Without Guilt, man would be no better than the other inhabitants of this planet. . . . Man, despite his enormous shortcomings, is nevertheless possessed of a greater number of kindly impulses than all the other beings where instincts are the larger part of life. These impulses, I believe are owed directly to this capacity for guilt. It is involved in the worst and best of man.
And you see it as helping us to sometimes choose a nobler course of action?
I do.”
Home is the Hangman, Roger Zelazny
To embracing guilt, and all the emotions,
Honey