Guilt is weird. Its basically an emotion put there to make you think you’re a bad person for other emotions, thoughts and actions. Guilt is a consequence of something wrong you have done, but it is often also a consequence of something you’re probably not sure was wrong at all, but either way the guilt is there, kind of as a “what if” buffer, just incase you deserve to be feeling it. Guilt is something we would probably live without. In our day to day lives, we probably don’t need guilt (unless you belong to my small fraction of incarcerated readers, in which case, you should probably hold onto that guilt good and tight because you probably deserve to live with the burden of what you’ve done for a very long time. I mean, only if it was something really bad, like against the free will of another human type of bad. If you sold some pot or something, let that shit go man).

I woke up feeling guilty that I didn’t write AT ALL this weekend. Who cares? If you ate a bit to much, if you didn’t exercise, if you broke any kind of promise to yourself at all (this only relates to promises you break to yourself. If you don’t keep your word to yourself, you should probably just not stress out about it and try to do better next time. Jesus will probably already be disappointed enough in you, so you don’t need excessive guilt on top of it. If you are breaking promises to others, that makes you a crappy person who probably deserves all the guilt…all of it).

I figure, you can stop judging yourself so harshly and use that energy for something positive. Worry, regret and guilt are all emotions sucking up perfectly good productive and kinetic energy. Time is too short and important to waste on feelings that are created our of second-guessing and fragile moments of surmounted insecurities.

It takes tragedies to wake us up. This is one of the faults of our species. We are never content, we dwell and we are 90% of the time miserable creatures, then something happens, usually something horrible or catastrophic either to us or someone we know/knew and it suddenly wakes us up. This will last a few hours or days at most, but moments of contentment briefly exist, before we sulk back into the despicable growling bottomless pits of people that we have evolved to be.

This weekend, by the hand of a tragedy, in one of these minutes of peace and gratitude that followed, I was given a revelation. A woman I used to work with a few years ago was robbed of her life in a horrible way by a coward. This woman was a gem of a person and when I heard what had happened, naturally, I felt sick. You hear things like this and you can’t swallow them, and after a while you body begins to process the tragedy and you become so thankful that you had the opportunity to know this person before they were gone. You become thankful for the health of your friends and loved ones and for your own health. But you want to do something that will make it better, not just for yourself, but for everyone who feels how you’re feeling and for the lost gem. In these moments of emptiness, these moments between gratitude and rage, my sister made a small suggestion that wouldn’t seem like much at first, but as the days pass, I am realizing that she found my escape. She suggested that I write a letter to the editor to share my thoughts on this tragic loss in our community. This was the action that would replace the emotions that make you useless, like regret, guilt and worry. I wrote for her, for me and for the sadness that was created the day she was taken away. It helped, regardless of however small of an amount.

Find a way of expressing yourself that helps you, fall helplessly in love with the feeling it gives you, share it and then use it to overcome everything. (The sharing part, yes as we have discussed is terrifying, but it is also necessary to make what you do real. If it is worth doing, it’s worth sharing. It might even change a moment of someone else’s time for the better.)

This is how resilience is born…probably.