*Disclaimer: Contrary to what some of these posts suggest I am a reasonably stable, functioning adult.*

For as long as I can remember my inner world has often revolved around the ebb and flow of guilt. Guilt is the negative emotion I most often struggle with, and the one which I have the least control over. I can conquer anger, I can ride out sadness and I can even battle insecurity when I have to. But guilt creeps up on me quietly, over and over from unexpected directions, finding a new object and a new form like an evil chameleon when I think I have wiggled my way out of it.

Not actually me.

As a child I knew how to handle guilt as it was predictably attached to school terms, and in particular to non-A marks. Each term there would be one or two subjects that I was not doing so well in. One of these was usually history, which included so much data it may as well have required memorizing the phone book. In September I would start out intending to keep up with all my studying consistently. In October I would get my first B and start feeling guilty. By December it would start becoming obvious that my final term mark in history would be a B, and I would feel extremely guilty. In January I would fight desperately for my A, and by February the term would be over, I would get my A or B, I would confess whatever it was to my parents and I could finally relax and let go. Then I would start over. During the summers I had much less guilt: only what was attached to extracurricular activities. For example, learning Japanese was entirely my idea, but it had turned out to be much harder than I expected, and I felt significant guilt about how little I could actually speak it after years of classes my parents had paid for.

As a child there was always the start of summer holidays, the day of absolution, the day to look forward to when I would finally become guilt-free, or nearly so. I have clear memories of the feeling of guiltlessness, as if I had become physically feather-light. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) life since then has become more complicated and multi-layered, and I haven’t experienced a “first day of summer” in a very long time. That doesn’t mean I don’t keep looking for it though. Many times I have made or have been tempted to make major decisions with the express purpose of alleviating guilt, or at least hoped that certain life changes would eliminate some of it. Most of the time this fails. There seems to be a preservation of guilt; even if I eliminate one source, the same amount of guilt re-appears somewhere else.

The example which illustrates this principle most beautifully is my maternity leave. My professional life has always been a significant source of guilt. In basic research success is ill-defined: best measured by publications perhaps, but there is a long pipeline from good idea to published article, and one can usually find a point along this pipeline where one looks bad. Maybe you are working on ten good ideas but haven’t submitted a paper in a while. Maybe you have been doing well on ideas and submissions but all your submitted papers are stuck with referees so you haven’t published in a long time. I love collaboration, but there is a special kind of guilt that comes from not finishing joint papers fast enough: in addition to feeling inadequate, you also feel like you are failing your collaborator. When guilt is attached to a project, it breeds anxiety, which then makes it that much harder to work on the project, which leads to more guilt: a vicious cycle. At times this professional guilt has gotten so bad that I seriously considered changing careers just to escape from it.

It will come as no surprise that I was looking forward to six months of maternity leave with the hope that I can leave all my math guilt in the office and give myself permission to work as much or as little on research as I felt like. This much I did accomplish: I worked little, but I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. I hadn’t felt so good about research in a long time. What I didn’t expect, though, is that all that professional guilt would quickly resurface in the form of parenting guilt. First it was about talking to Pixie: I’m trying to teach him my first language, which he’ll have to learn from me almost entirely, so I should be doing an exceptionally good job. Unfortunately, carrying on a one-sided conversation with a baby doesn’t come easily to everyone, and in particular it turns out not to be one of my natural parenting talents. (I’m much better at physical play.) This has produced abundant guilt in the early months.

Currently my mom is living with us to help with my transition back to work. This relieves some of the language pressure as she’s great at talking to Pixie, which also helps me learn to do it better. But instead of going away, the guilt has metastasized: my mom has made some innocuous comments comparing Pink’s parenting to mine, which was just enough of a nudge to get me to start stressing about whether she thinks that Pink is the better parent, and worse, whether she is right. (Always convenient to blame one’s poor mother for all of one’s neuroses.) This is a new gold mine of guilt as I can now feel guilty not only about the tasks that I do especially poorly but also about the ones that Pink does particularly well, which happens to be most tasks.

Finally, as I got close enough to returning to work full time and giving up my primary caregiver role, I saw much of the guilt shift back from parenting to publications. As those papers I should have finished long ago and the co-authors I haven’t talked to in months crept back into my consciousness, I finally reached the stage where I sit awake at night trying unsuccessfully to convince my fussing baby to go to sleep, and think about math guilt. I think this means I have it all!

Another good example of a failed attempt to reduce guilt was donating stem cells. I had been on the world-wide stem cell registry for a long time, never expecting anything to come out of it as usually nothing ever does: the chances of being a genetic match for an unrelated patient are astronomically low. During an especially guilt-ridden period of my life I nonetheless found out that I was one of those chosen few, and I was asked to donate my stem cells. Unfortunately the request came two weeks before an international move, and the process would take several months and multiple check-ups and procedures. Despite the logistical mess I said yes without a second thought. On one hand, once you are asked to save a specific, albeit anonymous, person’s life, who will most likely die without your help, it is very difficult to say no. Even if saying yes involves some flying back and forth and a few needles in your arms, what is that compared to someone else’s life? How could I have said no? On the other hand, a non-negligible factor in saying yes was hoping that if I do what is a rather unquestionably noble thing, then this would cancel out some of the guilt in my head. No such thing happened. If anything, I felt guilty about the very donation (don’t ask). I did however contribute to saving a person’s life, so it was a good decision in the end. (Edit: Of course I am very happy with having donated my stem cells, and I was at the time as well. Of the many aspects of that story its effect on guilt is a lesser one, I might talk about the others one day in another post.)

The only true absolution I experienced as an adult was the end of my first marriage. I carried a lot of guilt attached to the relationship: things I had done that I shouldn’t have, things I hadn’t done that I should have, things I had left unsaid that I should have said. The guilt was cumulative: no attempt to reduce it worked, and sometimes such attempts only produced more guilt. There was so much guilt that it could no longer sit in my head inertly, directed at its proper subject, but instead started living its own life, finding fun new targets such as the things I ate. At the end of the relationship I hoped to let go of the guilt, but I worried that by the guilt preservation principle it would reappear, free to do what it pleased with its root cause removed. I was also worried whether the same build-up of guilt would happen in my next relationship.

I remember the day I realised that the guilt was gone: a warm summer day after the pain that had initially replaced the guilt had subsided. I was sumo wrestling with a bunch of mathematicians as part of a conference (true story) when the long-forgotten feeling of guiltlessness washed over me like a wave of glorious relief. I am also happy to report that I have no permanent guilt attached to Pink: we discovered a weird trick to deal with it day to day as it comes up. The trick is called “talking about stuff”; I highly recommend it. (I couldn’t resist the sarcasm there, but seriously, if talking about stuff were easy there would be a lot less divorce in the world. My ex-husband had really tried and so had I. The system that works for Pink and I takes a lot of time and patience, and involves long silences and lots of gentle encouragement.)

At least I can say that over the last few years the guilt in my life has gone through significant diversification. I think this is a good thing: you wouldn’t want all your guilty eggs in the same basket! Currently it is distributed roughly as follows: parenting – moderate, math – moderate, relationship – close to nil, family – mild (I don’t talk to them or see them enough), and miscellaneous – moderate. There is a lot of guilt that falls under miscellaneous. Pink has introduced me to environmental concerns, and while I don’t care enough to actually fly less, I now care enough to feel guilty about it. In my twenties I once betrayed a friend (big one). I never return borrowed books. I keep in touch with far away friends less then I want to. When I was about 14 I was walking in my neighbourhood and a lady was raking leaves on the street. Compelled by an evil spell I kicked the pile of leaves, making new mess, and she just said “Thanks”.

I’m sorry for failing you, everyone.

Over-share about guilt in the comments, or go ahead and psychoanalyse me.