I’m still sick with this stupid cold. And I’m still feeling acutely guilty about my poor little dead birds. I cleaned their cage this evening, and then hid it from my view.
Nobody has come right out and said they think I’m a monster. My friends have all either said nothing or said something compassionate, which helps relieve my guilt a tiny bit.
Guilt has got to be the worst of all the emotions, because it’s not transient. Anger, sadness, fear, grief – they all come and go, with each new instance emerging fresh and raw. The very act of experiencing them diminishes them.
But guilt is insidious and cumulative. Whenever I feel guilty about something, it brings to the surface everything else I’ve ever felt guilty about: I get swamped with layers and layers of guilty memories, all the way back to whacking some kid with my wooden stilt when I was five. And, at six, being briefly but secretly happy when my mother told me that Peter had committed suicide. And, at eight, dragging a cat to my house against his will and telling my mother that he had followed me. And, and, and….
I wallow in the cesspool of all my past sins, with the latest one forming the scum on the surface. My conscience never forgives or forgets anything. (It occurs to me that self-flagellation and self-pity may be two sides of the same coin.)
On the bright side, I know from experience that the guilt will recede, and then I’ll be relatively happy and guilt-free until the next time I do something awful.
I haven’t said anything yet because I’m afraid I will seem anti-bird if I do.
And I’ll have to acknowledge that maybe someone like me should have brought you some soup.
I let an entire bin of red wiggler worms die of starvation one winter. I wasn’t sick, just too lazy to take compost down to the basement.
Aww, thanks David.
I had a worm composter once too. Mine thrived in the summer but dried out in the winter because it was too close to a radiator.
We had one at work too for a few years. It did really well, but some of my coworkers were terrified of worms. When we moved to a smaller office, they begged us to get rid of it. We gave it to another non-profit organization, where I like to think it’s living happily ever after.
Just sayin’ Zoom . . . but I don’t think guilt is a feeling. I think it’s a judgment. Do you know Marshall Rosenberg’s book NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION? I love his work and my son is well-trained in it. It’s such a different way of being compared to how we were raised.
As for being afraid of worms . . . hmmmm. They feed us. I think I need to write a blog post about them and dirt.
Cheryl, XUP says the same thing, that guilt isn’t a feeling. But it is for me – I feel it, emotionally and physically. I wish it were merely a judgement. I’ll take a look for that book – thank you.