I Hate Guilt

I think I need to increase the amount of Zoloft I take. I am fairly happy right now and much blessed, but I am also engaging in a little compulsive behavior (incessant doodling and list making) as well as experiencing unwelcome pangs of guilt over my many wrongdoings over the years, including minor schoolyard offenses. The doodling occupies the mind to keep out the unpleasant memories. Along with the pangs of guilt about the past, I am also feeling a lot of guilt about not doing more for the poor and downtrodden and imprisoned among us. I suppose that I am feeling that I don’t deserve to be happy and that some catastrophe is bound to befall me to set things right and bring on me the misery that I truly merit. Thanks a lot, Southern Baptists, for inculcating in me such a powerful sense of guilt and a keen awareness of my own worthlessness.

Of course, the guilt would be more efficacious if it actually deterred me from stupid or malicious actions. As it is, it just makes me feel bad about the stupid and malicious things that I am going to do anyway. It really makes no sense with respect to events in the distant past that I cannot now remedy. I take solace that God does not hold my sins against me even though I seem to do so mercilessly. And it is some comfort to realize that I have always done what it was foreordained from the beginning of time that I would do, so none of it is really my fault in a cosmic sense.

I reckon that this is a foretaste of hell as I conceive of it. Those of us with lots of sins will spend eternity making it up to those against whom we have sinned, either by omission or commission. We won’t enjoy paradise nearly as much as folks like Mother Theresa or St Francis. For some, say Hitler or Stalin, paradise will be agony.

Life is going well, and my blessings are manifold, but I have to work around my guilt mechanism to take pleasure in them.