My-ugly-organs - Hand Me My Shovel, I'm Going In!

youve died a thousand times before who caaares just climb out of this grave again & again &agaian & agaian & again & again & aga

I don’t want to feel so alone anymore

inhale, hold

part of the process of learning to take responsibility for your actions is learning what things you can't take responsibility for. not just to protect you (e.g., from your own feelings of guilt; from people taking advantage of your willingness to take responsibility by attributing blame to you unfairly), but because to take responsibility is not just to say "it was my fault and i'm sorry" but to actually do things (to make amends and to mitigate and prevent future harm), and if you don't understand what to take responsibility for, you aren't going to understand how to take responsibility.

there is a lot that's outside of your control. people put a lot of emphasis on forgiveness in a way that i think is missing the point. being forgiven is not my priority. my priority is that i am doing what it is in my power to do. i can't control how that's received. i'd like it to be received well; i'm doing what i'm doing because i want to repair harm that i have caused to another person, so it matters to me if what i'm doing is actually achieving that goal or not. but there's only so much that i can do to achieve that goal, and if i'm doing it, and the harm is not repaired, that's okay. that's beyond my control. i have to make my peace with the fact that i've caused harm to another person that is not resolved, because i'm doing what i can and i have to continue living on this earth, and in continuing to live i'm going to be living with the fact of that unresolved harm. the most important thing at that point is for me to use my knowledge of the specific ways in which my actions harmed that person to change my behavior going forward to avoid causing that harm again, to the extent that that's within my power.

it doesn't do anyone - you or the people you have harmed - any good for you to assign responsibility to yourself for things that you can't control. if you're going to attempt the active work of repair and change you have to first identify what it's possible to repair and change. you can't actually repair a relationship all by yourself! you can only change your own behavior. you can only offer amends to the other person that they may or may not find sufficient. not to go all serenity prayer on you but guilt for the sake of guilt just makes you feel way more powerful than you actually are (because you think that everything happened because of you) and at the same time completely incapable of exercising your power (because you don't understand what your power actually is). to effect change you have to focus on the things you can actually change. focusing on the things you can't change is a problem not just because it's taking your focus away from the things you can change, but because it means you don't actually understand the sphere of your own influence. you're operating under what is essentially a self-centered worldview in which you could make everything better, you could prevent all harm, if only you were trying harder, if only you were a better person. who does that serve? it doesn't reflect reality. it makes you hate yourself and feel sorry for yourself at the same time, and it doesn't actually improve things for the people you harmed. it doesn't help keep you from harming people in the future, because you don't understand the territory and the limits of the causal relationship between your actions and other people's reactions to them.

you can only do what you can do. what you can't do, you can't do, and you can't take responsibility for doing, either in the past or present. after you realize that there is harm to repair the next step in the process of repair is to ask yourself what your responsibility is for the past and what your agency is going forward. everything else will follow from that. you simply cannot skip that step.

boy sleeping on a grave, christian joachim friedrich

Sylvia Plath, from “Poem for a Birthday: Witch Burning.” [ID in alt text]