Dissecting guilt

I am perfectly capable, when it comes to other people, of understanding and believing that your feelings are going to be what they're going to be, and it is actions that have moral value. But I still find myself fighting a rearguard action against the belief that my (lack of) feelings make me a monster, and there are a few factors exacerbating this at the moment.

One is that I used to feel losses (in the general sense, not just bereavement, which I am fortunate enough to have relatively little experience of), extremely intensely. I remember any number of occasions when I was young and was quite sure that the world was ending and there would never be anything good ever again. And then I grew up a bit, and recovered from enough losses that even when it would feel as though nothing would ever be good again, I knew intellectually that that wasn't true.

And over time something else has changed, and the last time I even felt like that was about eight years ago, when I thought for a few days that obandsoller was going to leave me. But still, in my head, that is what I ought to feel when losing something important, and anything less, or different, is a sign of my callousness.

Another is that I find it difficult to introspect accurately what I'm feeling. This might seem odd, for someone who can and will talk at length and in depth about the precise nuances of how his emotional and psychological responses work, but to a great extent I do that because I need to in order to make them make sense to myself. So when I have an unarticulated belief that I ought to be feeling a certain way, that becomes very difficult to satisfy when I don't feel able to identify with confidence whether I'm feeling it or not.

A third is that (perhaps at least in part because of my limited awareness of my feelings), I can think about experiences that one would expect to be profoundly affecting in what seems like a rather cold and calculating manner. On the way to Ramona's yesterday I noticed myself noticing that if she was dead that it would relieve me of the (sometimes draining) responsibilities I'd taken on in looking after her. I also noticed myself noticing that she would be unable to pay me back the money I've spent on buying her groceries since April, and wondering whether there would be any way to recover it from her estate. And whilst I didn't ascribe any great weight to either of those observations, I fear that to have made them at all is grotesque.

A fourth is a consciousness that our relationship was not as balanced and mutual as most of my other friendships. It fell, I suppose, somewhere between that of friend and carer. A lot of it was based around me offering her practical and emotional support, and I did so in part out of a sense of duty as well as through affection. Which is not to say that I didn't have genuine affection for her. I did. But I suspect that I was a much bigger part of her emotional landscape than she was of mine, and that feels uncomfortable, as though she deserved better.

I think I would find any reassurances that I am not a monster quite helpful at the moment, but I think particularly useful would be sharing of any times that you have felt discomfort about not feeling what you thought you were supposed to or expected to feel, and how you dealt with that. If you'd rather not share that on a public post, email to firstname at username dot org is good.