Summary

Celine Lai recounts her journey of overcoming crippling guilt to achieve self-acceptance and personal growth, leading to her metaphorical graduation from guilt and embracing her true self.

Abstract

Celine Lai, a first-degree graduate from guilt, shares her personal struggle with guilt that began in her childhood and persisted for 44 years. She explains how guilt eroded her self-esteem and hindered her career, as she constantly worried about the impact of her actions on others. Her transformation involved realizing that she was not at fault for events beyond her control, making amends for minor mistakes, forgiving herself, feeling a sense of belonging, and finding purpose in life. Through reading and writing on Medium, she discovered a supportive community and began to love herself, ultimately shedding the burden of guilt and finding freedom in self-expression and self-actualization.

Opinions

Guilt can be an unjust burden, especially for a child, leading to a lifelong struggle with self-esteem and career growth.
Self-forgiveness and self-love are crucial steps in overcoming long-held guilt.
Belonging to a community that appreciates and understands you can significantly contribute to personal resilience and recovery from guilt.
Engaging in activities that align with one's interests, such as reading and writing, can lead to a new sense of purpose and self-worth.
Letting go of unnecessary responsibility and guilt allows for genuine enjoyment of life and focus on personal aspirations.
The author equates her newfound confidence and freedom from guilt with the liberated spirit of the Flappers from the 1920s.

First Degree Graduate from Guilt

Celine Lai, 2013. Photo provided by Celine Lai

I have a few “feathers in my cap.”

With my having earned a Bachelor of Applied Science Degree in Biology and a Post-graduate Diploma in Social Research you might think that I would have been out in the wilderness surveying flora and fauna and researching the attitudes of people toward nature reserves.

Guilt got in the way and eroded my self-esteem and impeded my career advancement.

The photo above shows me dressed up as a Flapper at a work Christmas function.

Appearances can be deceiving for this is an image of me as I could be, and not as I was in real life.

I have spent most of my life wracked with guilt.

This has been the guilt of the child who thought what she did led to others getting hurt. This was mortification or horror mixed with guilt, borne at age eleven and after.

Guilt can be a crushing burden especially arising from the shoulders of one so young.

It strips away your sense of freedom to be yourself, because it places too much responsibility in your eyes. You repress your own being at the expense of trying to make up for wrongs.

For 44 years guilt had a strangle-hold on me, wearing me down with perceived obligations and the see-saw opposite of not looking after myself.

If you’re always obsessing over how your actions affect everyone around you, and criticise yourself for others being upset or hurt, guilt starts to erode a hole in your soul.

Guilt is a form of fear, a fear of doing something wrong and/or an admission of wrong-doing.

We seek absolution or a dissipating of our guilt, erroneously, through piling on the good-will or going out of our ways to help those we think we have wronged, or on their proxies.

But this means less attention or care of ourselves.

An important part of graduating from feeling long entrenched guilt is forgiving yourself and loving yourself.

Guilt weighs you down

The cloak of guilt is shed through:

(1) realising when you did nothing wrong or didn’t intend harm,

(2) if you have been a little thoughtless, making proportionate amends, and recognising that we all make mistakes,

(3) forgiving yourself for any perceived transgressions,

(4) feeling that you belong to enough people who make you feel cared for and understood, and

(5) having a purpose in life

I realised recently that it wasn’t the fact that I stayed at home that brought about the abuse in my family.

Out with the feeling that I caused harm and in with knowing that I looked after others to the best of my ability.

I forgave myself for anything I thought was wrong-doing, that wasn’t, and said “Hello” to loving myself.

I have always loved reading and writing, and when I began reading and writing on Medium in November 2018 my life took a new trajectory.

I began to feel good about myself and “the scales fell from my eyes”.

I realised that I am not a bad person, and on the contrary, I have supported others a lot.

I felt that I belonged to a community of readers and writers who appreciate and get satisfaction or enjoyment from my writing.

My graduation from guilt was complete when I no longer felt awful and upset when something I did or didn’t do seemed to lead to somebody missing out or being upset, in my opinion.

Through working on the five above, my guilt was assuaged and then disappeared this year. I felt free to really enjoy myself and to think about what I want for me.

The Flappers were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.

It wasn’t easy for me to become as confident as a Flapper might be.

It took 44 years of my learning in the class-room of life that I can love myself.

I found that taking on responsibility for the world and feeling guilty for being myself was not healthy for me, or helpful at large.

Once I accepted that I wasn’t responsible for what happened when I was a child, and stopped feeling overly responsible for everything; and began to like myself and truly care for myself, this opened the door to my delving into what I was interested in.

Shedding guilt allowed me to focus on my self-actualization and to feel that I belong to the normal ebb and tide of human beings.

With graduation from the guilt of being yourself comes great freedom.

Graduate from your consuming guilt and add another feather to your cap!

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