guilt

I’ve been speaking over and over again with friends about how guilt is useless. And about how it can be inhibiting. Whenever I’m worried about relatively trivial things, my mind immediately runs through the list of world terrors. Terrors that not only happen where my parents or friends’ parents grew up, but in my city, in my neighborhood, to my neighbors and to my friends. To the strangers I stand by on the subway platform. I think about how my personal life is dreamlike in comparison to most people. Even the bad things that happen to me—and some bad things have happened—have not been that detrimental. When I feel depressed or scattered or worried that I’ll never get what I want, that I’ll never write something I’m proud enough of, that I’ll never be as good of a person as I know I can be, that I’ll never fall in love again, that I’ll never make enough money, that bad things will happen to people I love and I won’t be able to help them, that I’ll step on dog shit or human shit and not notice for a while and then it will get on my leg—things are still, on the whole, exceptionally in my favor. It’s an odd thing to admit as a writer who makes personal work of any kind of seriousness, because then I’m also saying that I think my small problems and limited experience are worth listening to. And writing to you now, and having written very assuredly in various publications, of course I think that.

I repeat this to myself as a sort of mantra: Guilt about how good I’ve got it and how much I’ve got does nothing—for me, for anyone I love who suffers more consequentially than I do, for any stranger whose suffering I do or don’t witness, can or cannot imagine.

My own confusion about how to help springs from the ego.

My cowardly hope, when I’m being intellectually lazy, and no one with integrity can hear me and intervene, is that if I can find a way to help that satisfies my idea of what’s “enough,” I will have then earned my good life. But you don’t earn a good life. It is stupid luck. Yes, my parents and grandparents and ancestors suffered in ways I will never have to, but their suffering was not goal driven. It was circumstantial. Maybe they gave that suffering meaning in order to feel better, to keep living, to love their children. Maybe some of them did not succeed at feeling better, and continuing on living, and loving their children. Maybe this is why anyone feels compelled to do anything. Because some people connected to us did not manage or barely managed, and yet still, here we are.

Some of us, living the good life, soothe our guilt by telling stories about how hard we’ve worked to be so fortunate. And sure, I’ve worked hard. But I’ve never worked that hard, comparatively. I’m certain I could work harder. I don’t usually want to, and having a choice in that is like winning the lottery every morning I wake up. Some degree of success has come relatively easily, with plenty of debt, but I don’t think about money as intensely as I could—not anymore—maybe for somewhat fatalistic reasons, but also because I’m the youngest in a family of 5, I am a citizen of the most wealthy country in the world, I have a good job, I have a fancy college degree, I’m able bodied, people generally like me and, if I asked directly, would probably help me.

And yet, listing all these things doesn’t mean much when it comes to anybody’s suffering, not even my own. The conversation about privilege is one born from a legitimization of guilt. OK, so I was born lucky, certainly not the luckiest, but somewhere on the spectrum of great fortune. Now what? Those in power have designed the world as a lottery system and convinced enough people that it isn’t one, and that this ruthless and mysterious way of things is the way things must be. There are of course volumes written on how it’s not actually so mysterious. Still, so many of us are tantalized by the exclusionary promises of such a system. If I could just make more money, become irresistible, have power over the people who I’ve felt and who may actually have power over me, then, then, then, then.

So many of my friends, of various backgrounds and circumstance, yet usually some kind of artist, admit that they just want to make great work that everyone will love and that will make everyone love them. Of course. Me, too. It is not guilt or privilege or even suffering that is operative, here, but love, and how we think we might go about getting it. Certainly, for me and my friends who want to be so talented and so productive that we’re finally worthy of all the love we already have, it is hard on the ego to accept the truth of the lottery. Instead, we dream of properly working for something and that something properly working out. And I’ll admit it, amidst all the suffering, this absurd fact, this triviality that lives in my heart, this throbbing, needy ego that wants so desperately to be validated, does not always make me feel guilty—sometimes it makes me laugh.