Bespoke guilt

I was chatting with a friend the other day, being funny and confessional at the same time: "I'm so ashamed. I fell off the wagon. I bought shoes." He thought it was funny, and said so. Later we were both in the company of a third friend, and (still not comfortable with having bought the shoes, and seeking further reassurance) I did the same riff. This friend hadn't learned her lines, however, and said, "I'm glad you're back in the money. I read about your adventures as the Welfare Queen." I replied, "Gggghhhh." Not at ALL what I was looking for, and now, two days later, I still can't shake the effects of the dig.

In the first place, when I walked into the gathering, they were talking about defensive bridge play, and I (again being SO funny) interrupted, "WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?" Not getting the giggle I wanted, I overplayed it, "WHO'S DEFENSIVE???" The rest of them really wanted to get back to their discussion, so I let it ride. I don't have a particular problem with people not thinking I'm delightfully witty one hundred percent of the time, but I can see now that my defensiveness interjection was in fact the naming of The Juls Lesson for Today.

Second, the friend who made the welfare queen crack is, has been, and ever more shall be politically somewhere to the right of Ivan the Terrible (as someone once said about Trisha Nixon), and I know this, I've known it for years now. When we're together, I am usually careful not to bring up any issue on which we disagree -- not politics, CERTAINLY -- and in a previous blog, I referred to myself, with great irony, as a welfare queen because I had taken advantage of a state system that will pay for mammograms for low income women. My friend is not a nasty woman, she had expressed concerned about my cancer scare, and I am confident that she is glad that at least in New Mexico every woman can have a thorough annual breast and cervical cancer check for free.

On the other hand, she's been well trained to go into some kind of a spasm upon hearing certain phrases, "welfare queen" being one of them, and if I have been a supplicant at the public trough and then go out and buy SHOES, for God's sake, that is good reason to smack me. It's what's wrong with America: the Welfare Queen takes my friend's MUNNY and buys frivolous things with it, probably takes food stamps and buys cigarettes. Et cetera. I don't know exactly how the reasoning goes, since I don't listen to those talk radio guys because they make me so damned mad, but I know -- now -- that the opinions they bray override personal relations every time. Ideology trumps connection, as with Lenin and his Beethoven: he wouldn't listen to Beethoven because it made him feel things, and consequently made him less effective at, say, torturing and executing ideological dissenters, and he was committed to The Cause before all else.

So I got smacked. It wasn't personal, but I surely took it personally. And THAT'S the lesson. My friend is entitled to think and say whatever she wants, even to fight for her beliefs to the detriment of her friendships if those beliefs are closely held and more important to her. The object lesson for me is that my guilt is MY guilt, and, in the end, no amount of reassurance from other people will assuage it. It's my job to stop the guilt cycle for myself, and not depend on friends and loved ones to bail me out of what is really a self-destructive syndrome. What do they call the alcoholic guilt syndrome? Shame-based or something like that? Well, if one is determined to BE ashamed, that's how it's gonna be. Either buy the damned shoes, shut up and nevermind (Mary's choice for me) or pass them up and exert a little self-damn-control and reward myself with well-earned smugness.

A shrink friend once told me that guilt is the only man-made emotion, invented by organized religion as an effective tool for social control, and reinforced by modern society for its usefulness as a marketing device. Kids don't really have a choice about buying into guilt -- parents will pick up anything they can lift to get a child to do their bidding, and it's what THEY learned at the mercy of THEIR parents, yea back unto the thousandth generation -- and kids learn guilt and use it themselves. Guilt-tripping can prevent more violent measures, and, in its passive-aggressive form, is anonymous, so why not use it? No reason, until it, or its perversion, kicks back and the concomitant shame does damage to our connection with ourselves, and, as happened the other day, with our friends. The very minute we get the I-fucked-up stomach ache is the time to abort-abort-abort whatever thinking led to it. The event (e.g., shoe-buying) is not the point at all; the point is the willful infliction of shame and diminution on a psyche that is struggling to reach health and wholeness. That's the sin. There are plenty of people and institutions whose mission it is to make us feel bad about ourselves, and when we do their work for them, there truly is no hope for us.

So stop it, stop looking for approval, or paying attention to recrimination, or even sympathetic commiseration; any one of them merely reinforces the original guilt. Pretty new shoes make me feel better about myself and my ugly feet, and that's just A Good Thing all around.