Guilt - it's a tricky feeling. And one I find myself struggling with constantly. About lots of things and to varying degrees. There are of course many different kinds of guilt. There’s harmless guilt, like the name of this blog, referring to songs that are so lame they’re good. There’s nagging guilt, as in “I shouldn’t have eaten that cookie” or “I should really go to the gym.” There’s guilt in a court of law, as in “we the jury find you guilty of murder.” There’s moral guilt, as in cheating on your spouse or plagiarizing an essay. And then there’s psychological guilt, which according to Freud (and Wikipedia), is "an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something that one believes one should not have done (or conversely, having not done something one believes one should have done)."
It’s this last one that is haunting me these days. For women my age, this type of guilt is most often associated with working mothers - when they're with their kids they feel guilty for not working and when they're at work they feel guilty about not spending enough time with their kids. Well I have no children, but I still feel guilty when I make decisions that I think might disappoint or negatively impact others. I easily forget the mantra “you can’t please all people all the time” and so when I try to in fact do this, I end up overextending myself, having to back out of a plan and then feeling guilty about reneging. So in this way it’s my own fault.
But in another way, it’s something I have no control over. As a single childless woman with a good but not overly cumbersome job, living in a perfectly manageable 800 sq foot condo, I don’t really have any responsibilities beyond myself. So sometimes it makes it tough to figure out what my main priorities should be – Friends? Family? Job? Favourite activities? Decorating? The gym? Fashion? Food? Myself? When I choose one over the other why does it feel so bad? And then, when my friends’ and family's priorities are ordered differently than mine, and I choose one of mine over one of theirs, which I know might disappoint them, once again I end up feeling shitty.
One of the easiest ways to answer this of course should be - do what makes you happy. Life is too short … (fill in the blank here – to drink cheap wine, to read a bad book, to watch from the sidelines, and so on and so forth). Sadly it’s hard to live that way. In fact, living without guilt effectively means that you are a psychopath, something I don’t think anyone should really be aiming for. But a blog post like this one from Derek Miller does help to put things into perspective. I think what I should try to do is whenever I feel guilty (like really guilty, not the eating a cookie guilty) is to re-read the “Here it is, I’m dead” post and work on letting go of the guilt. It's really the least I can do. Check back with me soon and I’ll let you know how it goes.
And yes, the title of this post does refer to the classic Wham! song "Careless Whisper." When I googled the term "guilty feeling got no rhythm," imagine my surprise when I found out the actual words are "guilty feet have got no rhythm." Turns out I have been signing this song incorrectly for 25 years. This of course only adds to my enjoyment of it! In case you forgot how awesome George Michael was back in the day, I implore you to take a look:
