You are not the only one who feels guilt.
No, I was no raised Catholic.
I was raised human.
And as humans, we are taught to feel guilt.
We are taught to bathe in guilt.
Actually, we glorify guilt.
If, in your life, you don’t carry extreme guilt about something, you are not a compassionate, god-fearing human being.
So, we are taught to feel guilty for whom we love, guilty for how or what we eat, guilty for how we look, guilty for what we believe, guilty for the ethnicity we are.
Guilty.
Guilty!
GUILTY!
So, now, picture this.
When I was a child, I liked to eat. In fact, I would eat a whole bag of Oreo’s, Cheese Doodles, or some other thing like it, pretty much everyday after I came home from school.
Then I started to get a little overweight. And thus got teased mercilessly by my peers and virtually frowned upon by adults.
And, at a very young age, I felt ashamed of the way I looked; ashamed of my weight.
So I stopped eating.
Though I have somewhat reformed myself from my not eating days, I still carry with me the guilt of being chubby.
This guilt weighs so heavily on me that I revert back to binging on junk food. And then, when I feel guilty for what I have done, I don’t eat.
It is a vicious circle of never ending guilt!
And this is so not healthy.
It needs to stop.
The guilt needs to recede.
There is no reason to feel ashamed for sometimes indulging. There is no need to berate myself for being human.
But I can’t escape the guilt.
And the guilt can’t escape me.
No matter how far I’ve come, I still have far to go.
But we don’t need to feel ashamed of who we are.
Erase the guilt.
Be free.