Coming Up for Air
Giving myself grace isn't easy, but it's time
Hello, Friend,
I’m still recovering from whatever creepy crud crawled its way into my lungs. This takes time and I am infamously impatient.
It’s difficult for me to allow myself to be sick. I feel guilty for resting. I feel guilty for needing help. I feel guilty for not doing the things. I feel guilty for being grumpy and tired and snarking at the dogs for needing to go outside and back inside too many times. I feel guilty for not getting changed into ‘day clothes.’ I feel guilty for spending another day buried under a blanket on the couch trying to rest and get better while my husband is at work. I feel guilty for my lung condition that makes me so vulnerable. I feel guilty for neglecting this Substack.
I feel guilty when I am sick or injured or struggling to clear life’s hurdles. I know that’s just a feeling. It’s a useless feeling. It’s an irrational feeling. Yet it goes deep into the core of my psyche, into the oldest sibling in a broken family who must be strong and act like an adult story.
Act like an adult.
Whatever the hell that means.
I feel guilty for my ‘this close but not quite’ successes and my spectacular failures. I feel guilty for the times I quit when things became untenable. I feel guilty for the considerable fallout from those difficult decisions. I feel guilty for disappointing the people I love. I feel guilty for never reaching my full potential.
Intellectually I know these feelings of guilt are useless. They’re self-indulgent bullshit. I’m allowed to be sick or injured or struggling. I’m allowed to fail. I don’t have to ‘succeed’ to be worthy. None of this is real. Yet, my guilty feelings make me reticent to ask for help, or allow myself to accept failure, or reach for grace.
I get stuck in this battle between what my intellect knows to be true and what my subconscious imagines to be real. This leads to the tension that persists in my body and prevents me from fully exhaling and letting go. I’m stubborn and independent and it’s almost impossible for me to ask for help, because I feel guilty for needing help. Thus my neck and my arm and my hand, thus my scarred lungs, thus my tender heart, thus my unwelcome hermitage.
Intellectually I know that I need to admit vulnerability, accept my imperfections, and give myself the grace for which I ache. I need to offer myself the compassion I offer others. Yet that other voice, that inner critic, that irrational subconscious guilty mind, persists.
Act like an adult.
I have to let go and let go and let go. Even though I feel like I’ve let go of so much, I must let go of more. Guilt, anger, shame, fear, regret, disappointment, loss, pain, illusions, indulgences, personal mythologies, all of the baggage people drag around that holds us back. I have to keep letting it go until there’s nothing left but love.
I think that’s the point, emptying our vessel to let love fill us to the brim.
I’m 62 years old and most of my life is in the rearview mirror. I don’t want to spend whatever remains feeling guilty, feeling less than, feeling like a failure, feeling like a disappointment, feeling like I have to hold up the sky. I don’t. I never did. I’m just a human having a human experience doing my best to stay kind in a cruel world.
That’s more than enough.
“You don’t have to do anything sensational for people to love you.”
Fred Rogers
I’m having some thoughts about things here, about what this is and where it’s going. I feel like it’s time to peel back a few layers and get to ‘the heart of the heart of the heart’ of the matter. What that means is not yet clear, but I’ll keep you posted.
If I feel up to it, I’ll be back tomorrow with some Little Bits of Joy! If not, know that I’m going to try not to feel guilty about it.
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Madge’s Kleenex and Hot Tea fund.
"You don't have to prove you have a right to exist." When my therapist said that some 30+ years ago I cried for days. Like you, I felt guilty all the time for never being or doing enough or for being too much - too opinionated, too energetic, too creative, too smart (for a girl), too sure that I was meant to be a writer (instead of a dentist as my parents planned), too sure that life should be fair and that all beings - human and otherwise - deserved to live and live well.
I don't know that I've completely overcome all that, but I DO know that I would never ever say or do the things that were said and done to me as a child, so I keep returning to that small me - the me that felt she wasn't loved for who she was but what she could do. And I keep saying, "you are enough, you are enough, you are enough, and I love you."
I love the brilliant, funny, self-aware, and creative person you are Margot. Sending a warm hug bomb your way, which is meant to exterminate the guilt while soothing your tired lungs. (((Margot)))
Sending much love. 🩷