Growing up around something I didn’t know I had, I blamed myself for what I saw as my misgivings. I struggled to learn, struggled to socialise, struggled to fit in, and I carried anger.
I felt guilty for under-achieving. Over the decades I slowly began to realise that guilt, when we choose to face it, can be constructive. It’s a natural response when we feel something's wrong, even if takes years to uncover.
For decades I carried guilt around my education that was never mine to carry or own – like throwing my report cards away when mum gave me them before I left home, because I couldn’t bear to read what had been written.
Over the years, I internalised that guilt, but eventually worked through it, pushing myself to improve and to strive to do better. I've had to work hard at letting go. But guilt is not the same as blame. Guilt relates to our actions, while self-blame attacks our sense of self-worth.
I wasn’t in denial about any of what happened to me, but I did avoid difficult conversations about my education. I would often fabricate stories about my education to avoid the truth. I was embarrassed.
Excessive guilt can become harmful – but throughout my journey, I was determined not to let what happened to me, define me.
Self-forgiveness is important, but struggling with self-forgiveness can take its toll. It can contribute to challenges such as depression, eating disorders, or substance abuse. Self-forgiveness isn't always straightforward.
Although letting go of guilt, and blame is important for your emotional wellbeing, it should never replace personal accountability. True self-forgiveness means recognising what's yours to own, learning from it, and choosing to grow.
At the same time, awareness involves more than understanding your own feelings. It requires us to recognise the role others have played.
I want to finish with this. How do you reconcile growing up with a physical, mental and emotional disability without knowing you had one? Living in the dark, always being blamed for being stubborn, awkward and angry. Being blamed because you are angry, because you're out of control, when in reality you simply don’t understand what is happening to you.
All you can see is that you're failing to make sense of things, even struggling to learn the basics.
You can see that everything feels harder, but you don’t understand why. In the meantime, it all becomes about you – your behaviour, your anger, your shortcomings. I go back to “if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say it.”
Where we are responsible, making amends matters. Sometimes this is practical – replacing something broken or correcting a mistake. Often, it’s simply having the courage to acknowledge the harm caused.
Not everything needs to be forgiven, but understanding helps that part of the process.
So how do you make sense and reconcile that later in life?
What would anyone seriously think?
