Giving up on guilt

The dog stared at me pitifully—with pity for himself or for me it would be hard to say. It was cold and overcast, a grim pandemic winter day. Should I walk him now, or at lunch? Dog-mom guilt overtook my get-to-work guilt. I booted up and took him out, crunching through the fresh snow. A real nose-hair-freezer of a morning. Less than half a block away from my front door, a neighbor had shoveled their sidewalk, but not salted it. The ice was invisible, the fall instantaneous. I lifted my right arm and my hand flopped like a wet noodle. Then, the pain.

By noon, the sun had come out and melted the sidewalks. I would have surgery the next day.

Guilt is a powerful motivator that comes with poor consequences. It runs deep in us. I hear it in my friend’s voice when I ask her if she wants to join me for a mid-morning, ice-free walk with the dog. She has a hybrid position in a helping profession that demands a tremendous amount of emotional labor. She feels guilty getting away from the screen for a half an hour, even though she will definitely make up the time later. I hear the guilt with which other friends withhold the overwork employers have come to expect from salaried employees. From the newly laid off I hear a horrible and familiar inner search for what precisely they should feel guilty about, because surely it is their fault that they were let go.

Today I am recovering from a second surgery to remove the now-redundant hardware that held my wrist together. I feel my tendons twanging like a guitar string as I type, so I will get straight to the point: ya gotta give up guilt. From over here on the other side of corporate work, I see so much guilt in the workplace. It is no good. That cold morning three years ago I was battling a lot of guilt over my resistance to the job before me. There were good reasons for that resistance, and not ones I needed to feel guilty about. I couldn’t fix that feeling in that moment, but I could fix my guilt about not walking the dog. I was walking out of guilt while running away from guilt. Should we be surprised I ended up unable to do either of the things I thought I should have been doing that day?

If I had blithely given the dog a bone to gnaw, made a luxurious breakfast, taken a bath with an escapist novel, shimmied to some R & B, and started work late knowing our lunchtime walk was a mere two hours away, I would not have had an injury, nor needed weeks of sick leave.

I still turn to guilt to get me going. I scolded a freelancing friend about this recently: “Don’t be your own worst boss.” I am good at making pronouncements like that, but usually because I need to hear them myself. Guilt continues to raise its ugly head. I need only jangle my plastic baggie full of titanium wrist-parts to question its seductive motivational powers. Guilt is an artificial structure propping up our broken work lives—strong, unyielding, and painfully tangled with our soft tissues. With what minerals will we build back our bones?

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