🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
I feel many and varied burdens of guilt that I have accrued throughout my life. The disappointments I have caused in those who hoped and expected much of me; the consequences of my failure to act in a principled and constructive manner; the more personal responsibility for my direct acts harming others by lying ,manipulating, thievery, property damage, violence, verbal abuse… There is no shortage of fault and blame that I can place squarely upon my own shoulders.
To what purpose?
I used to don this cloak of self-pity with such a sense of self-righteousness that I violated every victim all over again. Definitely in principle if not in actuality. The self-pity is a ploy for attention, an attempt to shift attention from my guilt to my pain: To steal the compassion due to my victims to make myself feel better.
I have no right to carry a burden of guilt in such a manner on behalf of someone I have victimized. The guilt that I feel does not in any way vindicate me or absolute me. I am not the survivor, I am what was survived. It is said that each person is the hero of their own story, yet in any honest story about my life I am almost always the antagonist.
None of that changes the fact that I do experience the weight of responsibility for my past acts. As well I should! The emotions are beyond my control with my only control being in how I respond to those feelings. My response, then, must be one that at the very least, ceases the path of destruction. I have been wreaking. Otherwise, what’s the purpose? I can see the very visible imagery of my action as a stone and the consequences as ripples across the surface of a body of water. In a pristine environment you can see what happens clearly, like the concentric rings spreading from the point of contact in an ever diminishing cycle. Life is not so neat, though. More actions cause more ripples that cross, amplify, or distort each other. It then becomes difficult to measure the true consequences we may cause and when they diminish.
Some times I do a meditative exercise on this imagery. I imagine things I have done as that stone and try to see people touched by those waves and in what ways they feel those crests and troughs. Not just direct victims, though they exist as near the epicenter as possible, but also their family members, friends, my family and friends, anyone that any of those many individuals may interact with, who may influence another because of that…
Six degrees of separation is an idea with profound implications. If I can be connected to any one person in the world through six other people, than any act I perpetrate is only 6 steps from harming or helping every single person on earth. That is an incredibly responsibility. I bear a burden of guilt as an over present reminder of how harmful my actions can be. I do not pity myself because I am better now than I was then. I ask for no pity from others and also that no others pity me because I would ask that compassion to be distracted to those I have harmed. They are the survivors, not me. The reason I carry this metaphorical, emotional weight is the same as the reason I lift the very real, physical eight of steel plates: TO make myself stronger. I hope I become stronger in my principles by the lessons this guilt ever teaches me.
I cannot pity myself for the burden of this weight. I am thankful it has given me the strength to stand in the light. The pain is not my own, but as its creator it is absolutely my responsibility.