“You have learned to bury your guilt with anger. I will teach you to confront it, and to face the truth. You know how to fight six men. We can teach you how to engage six hundred. You know how to disappear. We can teach you to become truly invisible.” – Batman Begins (The good 2005 one, not the earlier crap.)
If you don’t read this blog, I’ll shoot this car. Then wouldn’t you feel guilty?
I sat staring at the ceiling in the darkened apartment, the lights from the parking lot casting shadows on the walls. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. Finally, I resorted to reading. I’d read every night until I literally fell asleep with a book in my hand. I remembered, in particular, reading a big, heavy hardcover at the time, one that was about 1053 pages long.
I was being eaten alive inside. I was wracked with guilt.
What was I scared of?
Well, I hadn’t finished my master’s degree yet, but I had moved halfway across the country and started a new job. No one was asking me about my degree, but I knew that dreaded moment was coming soon. “So, John Wilder, where’s your degree? We need to see a copy.”
This was impossible. My thesis wasn’t even written yet. And I had moved halfway across the United States and taken a new job.
My torture continued. Outside of the lack of sleep, the guilt from knowing that I hadn’t finished my degree sent a chill down my spine (or is it up my spine?) every time I thought about it. At work. Shopping. Waxing my moose statue. Finally, after a week or so of this torture, I went in to my boss, who was only five or so years older than me. We started off talking about the work I was doing. At the end I brought up the degree.
John Wilder: “Oh, and one other thing, I’m not quite done with my master’s yet, I still need to finish and defend my thesis.”
Boss: “Whatever. I’m not even sure the company cares. In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. We hired you, not a degree.”
And that was that.
In that moment all the fear left me, and I felt silly for worrying about it, and even sillier for keeping it bottled up inside of me, eating away at me like a Kardashian at an all-you-can-eat waffle and cream cheese covered bacon buffet. Sometimes that horrible truth you have bottle up inside of you . . . is no problem at all.
This has been the norm in my life: if I confronted the problem, or was honest about it upfront, the problem (most times) went away. And when the problem didn’t go away, fixing it because I was honest and upfront was easier than the times (in the past) that I’d waited to confront the issue.
Guilt is a cousin to Worry, and not the good kind of cousin that brings a twelve-pack to your backyard barbeque and then offers to watch your kids so you and the wife can go have a dinner out. No. Guilt is a bad cousin that shows up at 3am, kicks your dog, and eats that steak leftover you have in the fridge while talking with its mouth full and smelling vaguely like a wooden barroom floor near a Marine base. But Guilt and Worry are related.
Worry is paying for the future problems you might have, whereas Guilt is worrying about the repercussions from past actions. Let’s be real: I wasn’t worried so much about not having the degree (I did finish it a year later) but was really worried about having moved halfway across the country only to be fired and become economically destitute – a warning sign for future people to say, “don’t be like that idiot.” I had done the deed. Or in this case not done it. My question was what would happen once I’d been found out.
And most of the time your imagination can create future consequences far scarier than they ever would be in normal reality. Unfortunately, I’m an imaginative guy. I can go from getting a “C” in a college class to getting kicked out of school to living in a squalid drug den and smelling like Johnny Depp in about three steps.
The choices (if you don’t want to eat yourself up alive inside) are simple: confront the guilt, or, better yet?
Don’t do things that make you feel guilty.
Duh.
