guilt

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

I have moral scrupulosity. It’s a type of OCD. And the truth is, explaining it through words is nearly impossible. Some things can only be explained through pain. My moral scrupulosity has tortured me for years. I question how long I’ve actually had it, looking back on my childhood and realizing how obsessive and compulsive I was about being “good”. There’s a good chance I’ve struggled with this mostly my whole life.

I say that guilt is the worst feeling in the world. When I feel guilty, shame rises up in my throat like fire. It literally burns, physically. It physically hurts me.

At a certain point in life, without a single close friend, I came to the false conclusion that the only one I truly had was myself. And what if I were to betray myself? What if I, the most important and crucial part of my future, decided to be something unreliable? That would be the collapse of my world. I would simply have nothing left. Most people, I am told, do not wonder if they will betray themselves, because they are them. When you have OCD, this logic is no comfort at all. None of it really means anything to you. The fear outweighs all other thoughts.

My whole life I have invested in trying to be “good”. When things felt unstable (which was most of the time), I had to rely on something. And people knew me as the favorite student, as the rule follower, as the quiet and shy worrier. And so I took their labels and made myself meet the standards they set for me. Nothing could change me, so at least one thing would stay the same. If the world fell apart, well then damnit, at least I’d be “good”!

But then I realized quickly that even I, who tried so hard, was capable of doing “bad”. Which meant I myself was capable of being “bad”. I couldn’t handle that thought. I bottled it up for years until it all came spilling out of me at age 11. I spent days and weeks and months writing out confession letters for minor mistakes, though in my head, they were terrible errors I could never redeem myself from. I apologized in regular conversation so frequently it was as common as a “hello”. I spent hours staring up at my bedroom ceiling thinking of all the “bad” things I had done. It ate me up from the inside out. It hurt like no other pain I’ve ever experienced. I hated myself more than anyone could ever learn to hate me. And hating yourself while being yourself is a terrifying thing, because you can never escape your own mind.

But your mind can change. Your mind can change from a hell to a livable place. I wouldn’t have ever believed that then. I would’ve laughed at you if you told me so. I would’ve laughed and laughed and laughed and probably cried if you told me I’d actually have the most amazing friends in the world. But now I do.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

The thing about guilt is that when you feel guilty, you forget basic truths. When you have OCD, truth does not help usually, sadly (there are therapies that help instead). But to anyone who benefits from this, I wish you the best of luck in the world.

“You do not have to be good.”

You are allowed to screw up. You’re allowed to make mistakes so big and embarrassing and “bad” that you can’t believe yourself.

The world doesn’t end here. I promise it keeps going. Everyone thinks it stops going because pain feels insurmountable and the world is so so so messed up sometimes. But it doesn’t end here. There’s time for it to get better. You just have to be here to see it.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

poem in italics is by Mary Oliver