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Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind

As my regular readers -okay, both of them- no doubt remember, my mother was a teacher who majored in Guilt in Normal School (‘Teacher’s College’ in old-speak) with an elective in Atonement. She undoubtedly got high marks because, unlike the rest of us who majored in something and promptly forgot about the details after graduation, she remained wedded to the higher calling it expected of her.

As a result, I’ve always felt a little guilty about guilt -as if it were something I might be able to shed, but felt a little, well, ashamed about tossing it away like a Macdonald’s wrapper. Ever since I switched to long pants it has accompanied me like a crumpled bit of paper stuck in my back pocket. I mean I’ve gotten used to it, and it no longer bothers me as much as, say, a stone in my shoe or anything, but it’s still there and I can feel it even now as I sit to write this jeremiad -especially now that I’m drawing attention to it. I suppose that, like wearing glasses, being short, or getting indigestion after too much pizza, it is something others accept about me.

Let’s face it, you can’t see guilt; I mean not really. I can usually get away with it unless the guilted party is present and confronting me; and even then, a smile can usually diffuse any but the most egregious offences for which I am guilty and therefore can’t disguise it.

Given that I’ve lived with guilt for years like someone with an abusive partner, I suspect I have grown cerebral callouses. In fact there are many transgressions I cannot even identify anymore; some types of guilt, like sleeping dogs, are best not awakened, or even jiggled . The obvious ones -being  rude, or taking a sneak-bite out of one of my friend’s doughnuts at our Wednesday morning coffee meetings- I can pretend apologies, although they all know I don’t mean them. Most of my guilt, however, lies deeper than those idiosyncrasies: like my upset stomach, it is often hidden, rarely attributable, and seldom remediable. It is more like the imposter syndrome I used to feel in university when I pretended I knew who Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet, was and to prove it, often quoted the only line of his poetry I could remember (in translation, of course): ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there’. I always made sure that I didn’t say it as a challenge though, just a neat way to end the conversation of someone who had an opinion I didn’t share.

I suspect I realized that guilt didn’t always require something on which I could pin the feeling; the whole notion of guilt is more complex than that, I think. I usually experience guilt out of remorse for something I should (or should not) have done. That nebulous territory pretty well encapsulates it for the adult me. My mother as I remember, usually tried to attach it to more solid, easily identifiable things, like not cleaning my room, or feeding scraps of dinner I didn’t like to my dog who always stationed himself under my part of the table; my guilt was seldom as objectively pinned as hers. When she accused me I felt guilty and I knew why. Now that I’m grown up, I’m not always even sure if it’s guilt I’m feeling.

One thing that I should stress at this stage though, is not that I feel like I’m a bad person -it’s not shame that I feel (well, not usually anyway); just a sense of almost unidentifiable but vague discomfort the source of which I’m often not able to identify.

In my dotage, however, I feel I may finally have narrowed down the field. After a bout of ill health I was told by my doctor that I had to limit my food choices (or else risk heaven knows what consequences); straying from that new food gospel encouraged retributive gastrointestinal justice for my trespass. It occurred to me that the fear of reprisal closely mirrored the guilt I had known as my uninvited companion for years. I wondered if food -any food that I had previously enjoyed, or food that I overate in a quick bid for satiety- might be the stimulus.

I stumbled upon an article somewhere about the important role that the gut microbiome plays in suggesting (okay then, causing) emotions in its cerebral cousin when things aren’t to its liking: something about disrupting, or maybe just changing serotonin production from the enterochromaffin cells of the gastrointestinal tract… or is it dopamine…? Anyway, it can change things way up in the head if it wants. It makes sense that if the stuff which the microbiome is used to eating (or whatever it does with it) is overwhelmed, changed, or missing then, well, feces can hit the fan (sorry to be so earthy). I mean, of course it makes sense that the bowel flora would fight back. You gotta please those who have to work for you behind the curtain, eh?

In fact, I subjected my theory to a sort of double blind trial to test it out (actually, it was a non-blinded test with an n of one). I purposely skipped lunch one day (well, I had a Tim Horton bagel -just the ungarnished, untoasted 12 grain bun-like thing) and lo and behold, no guilt. I mean I could feel it lurking, just waiting for a microbial signal to crack open the door for it; but nope, no guilt. Later that day, absolutely starved, I over-ate supper and dessert, and had trouble sleeping as guilt burned in my head, gurgled in my innards, and churned in my dreams in retribution.

I now try cutting back on the size of meals whenever I feel I can stomach it (sorry) and I do think on those occasions, I can feel my microbiome thanking me (briefly) with dopamine surges… or is it oxytocin? I always forget. Serotonin, anyway.

It feels encouraging to have a credible explanation for guilt after all these years of blaming it on my mother -although now I understand why she insisted I didn’t snack between meals or I wouldn’t  get dessert. I wonder if they actually taught that in Normal School or whether my mother was ahead of her time because of the many Reader’s Digest magazines we kept in the bathroom…

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