This week has been a lot of sleepless nights and meditation trying to get to the source of guilt that I've been feeling. It's an interesting paradox when you know that you feel guilt from somewhere and have a general idea of where to look but just can't see it. Well if you stare into that abyss long enough, you'll drive yourself batshit crazy or find what you were looking for. Perhaps it'll just find you instead. Anyways, it happens when it's supposed to happen, so let's do this thing.
Diving into the childhood found some loosely related issues, but most of those felt like retreading a landscape that I was already intimately familiar with. It gave me some new perspective, but didn't get to the source of the conflict. Moving on from there, I had to examine my interactions with others. I don't believe any of us are perfect and I'm sure we've all done things that could ideally have been done differently, but we can't change those things and if we could, we wouldn't be who we are without those lessons.
I've spent plenty of time making peace with previous actions and finding acceptance. This again felt very heavily like retreading, but the map is not the territory. While examining things I overtly felt negative, I honestly couldn't find anything that I hadn't accepted and made peace with yet. I feel that's fair in some regards as I have a highly self-critical nature and tend to be harder on myself than anyone else ever could, but perhaps the issue wasn't with the overtly negative interactions.
Can we feel guilt for things done in the service of others? Even when the other makes it clear that what we're doing is at their request? It's an interesting dilemma, but apparently we can. You see, once upon a time I made a promise. The kind of promise you mean to the core of your being, especially at the time you said it. That contract was burned long ago, but the guilt of breaking that promise remained.
With greater awareness, it becomes abundantly clear that the promise made was so far outside of the realm of possibilities that I would never make it again. How can you promise someone the impossible and hold yourself to it? Obviously you can't, but apparently you can't stop that failure from haunting you until it becomes abundantly clear that it is and has been for years.
What is this colossal whopper of a lie that has been weighing on my soul for years? I promised someone I would never let them go. For all of the obvious reasons, this is a stupid thing to promise anyone. That is a two-way commitment that requires both parties to stay in alignment on that agreement and can't be maintained by only one party. Worse than that, it's something entirely outside of our control. We all die eventually and letting go and grieving is a part of that process.
Whether the person still exists in some form or not is kind of irrelevant because whoever I was in that moment and whoever they were in that moment have been dead for quite some time. It didn't stop me from meaning what I said in that moment and it didn't stop me from putting an unrealistic expectation on myself, even with the best of intentions. When we make a commitment on that level, regardless of the impossibility, it leaves a sense of failure and guilt because it ultimately feels like: "I wasn't enough."
How could anyone ever be enough to do something not physically or spiritually possible? Clearly they couldn't. So why carry around guilt about it and let it project onto all my future relationships? I shouldn't. If we don't set unrealistic expectation for ourselves, life is much more manageable. If one can recognize the root of the problem and embrace mindfulness to be sure to not repeat the pattern, then the lesson is learned and there's no more reason to feel guilty and project that guilt onto interactions with others in the present. Much love. Peace.