Lookin' for Fun and Feelin' Guilty

Ok, so usually when I post on this blog I take great care to have well-worked out thoughts. But there are times when I use blogging itself as a way to work out thoughts, and I seem to be in more of this mode these days.

I have noted throughout my life that I don't identify with having the feeling of guilt. This used to be a sort of strangely prominent thought in my mind's landscape, as odd as it is for an apparent absence to be prominent. But today I identified a feeling of guilt, and I'm wondering what this is telling me.

I told my husband this tonight and he burst out laughing (well, "burst" in the very mild way he bursts). My feeling of guilt was over the fact that we went to the 11am Mass this morning instead of the 9am Mass. You see, yesterday morning he had suggested that we go to the 9am Mass, since we've been getting up early and all these days, and because we had our parish picnic this afternoon. I said at the time "I suppose we could," but in reality my feeling was "No, that would be so disappointing!" The disappointment stemmed from thinking of not being able to talk to my friends who go to the 11am Mass. I'm just not able to process this freely enough yet to be able to simply have the thought available to say to my husband, "No, that would disappoint me because I wouldn't be able to talk to my friends!"

As it turned out, my daughter woke me up at about 3:50 for a drink of water, and it was after 5 when I got back to sleep because the cat had gotten herself stuck in the bathroom, and I was too awake to not worry about her falling through the false ceiling tiles onto the kitchen floor (long story) and too tired to get her out of the bathroom. So when my alarm went off at 7 I duly turned it off, and when my husband came to wake me up I explained I'd missed a chunk of sleep and wanted to sleep some more. In the meantime, my son woke up, so hubster and he built a Lego town until I got up, too close to 9am to comfortably make it to that Mass.

So, I should have been happy, right? I got what I wanted. We went to the 11am Mass, I got to see two friends and their brand new babies, I set up a play date for my children and had a few other side conversations. But no, my heart was not completely free, because I felt I had stolen what I wanted, and I felt guilty. That was perhaps most noticeable to me because of the conversations I did not have or pursue, but wanted to.

This makes me realize that my seeming lack of the feeling of guilt in the past is probably better understood as such a ubiquitous sense of guilt that I knew nothing else but. My inability to enjoy has been essentially a denial of my right to be happy unless it happens to me absolutely, unarguably by accident. It's not my fault that I'm happy! is the only condition under which I once was used to happiness. Happiness was always a purely passive experience of something happening to me, and not something I sought after. No wonder I experienced it so rarely.

Now I feel like I am learning to undo all these bizarre and twisted ways of thinking about my relationships and my happiness. Well, I can't undo it, but I can become conscious of it and pray for and receive the grace to be free, and ask my friends "This is bizarre and twisted, isn't it?"

This is bizarre and twisted, isn't it?

P.S. If you need help with the blog post title, this is for you.