The False Guilt You Have Been Carrying
Some of what I have been blaming myself for was never mine to carry.
Are you carrying guilt that does not actually belong to you? Most people who have lived through what you have lived through carry far more guilt than they actually owe. Guilt for staying. Guilt for leaving. Guilt for not having seen it sooner. Guilt for the shape of your responses in moments when you were doing everything you could to survive. Guilt for not being further along than you are.
Look at one of these guilts, today, and ask whether it actually belongs to you. Did you have, at the time, the information you would have needed to choose differently? Did you have the energy, the safety, the resources? Were you doing the best you could with what was actually available to you in that moment? If the answer is yes, then the guilt you are carrying is not a fair accounting of what happened. It is a debt you were handed that you do not owe.
You are allowed to be honest about the things that, looking back, you wish had gone differently. Honesty does not require condemnation. You can notice something with sadness and let it become a teacher rather than a sentence. The parts that were genuinely yours to grow from will keep teaching you for as long as you let them. The parts that were never yours to carry can be set down.
Setting down what was never yours to carry is not letting yourself off the hook. It is being honest about the size of the hook. You have been carrying things that belonged to someone else — or to a situation, or to the limits of what any human could have done in your place — for far longer than was ever fair. You are allowed to let those go.