A recurring theme that I find resonates most often when I start to unpack things, or peel back the layers of understanding on my own experiences and interpretation of them is guilt. It weighs heavily, draping itself over my shoulders like an oversized coat that’s soaked through with rain, dragging along the floor as I try to wade through already ankle deep mud. In short, impossible to ignore, and even harder to put down.

Experience teaches you that despite how heavy it might feel, that it’s presence offers a sense of protection, knowing you’d last a little longer wearing a wet coat than trying to brave the rain without one. It’s this duality of guilt that makes it one of the most destructive of feelings, and if left unchecked, deadly.

As part of my community work, one of our key partnerships is with the Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK's leading HIV and sexual health charity, named after the first person to die from an AIDS-related illness in the UK. As part of their work they run a speaker series called Positive Voices, where people either impacted by, or living with HIV tell deeply personal stories that are always inspiring; carrying themes of strength, resilience and empowerment despite the weight of guilt that that they carry.

It’s the destructive nature of this feeling that pushed the woman I met this week to the brink; the overwhelming guilt the catalyst, and feeling isolated and alone because of it the flame. It was the simple question from a stranger, “Do you have children?”, that finally pulled her back from the edge. It’s both of these things that brought my own experience, and those of people I once knew into sharp focus. I have shared in conversation many times over that it’s in these moments of deep despair that individuals who decide to take their own lives are selfless and brave, not selfish, and this is a hill I will happily die on.

Instead, they’re driven to their actions by the sense that their existence is weighing on everyone around them; thinking (incorrectly) that by ending their own lives it will unburden others, relieving the pain of the suffering they both cause, and feel as a result.

Guilt is not kind.

What’s deeply concerning is how normalised it is to use guilt, and someone’s moral compass, to manipulate and drive individuals to conform to certain behaviours, even if they might be harmful or detrimental in the long term. There are many threads here, and untangling them all is going to take a significant amount of work, but if I pull a single thread out for now it’s this;

You don’t have to feel guilty for your mistakes. It’s what makes you human. You are not to blame. You are a product of a society that values conformism over individuality and submission over defiance; a society that tries to destroy any sense of self worth that comes from your authentically human experience. I say “tries” here because it doesn’t succeed, and it never will.

Think for a moment about the guilt that you carry in your own life, it’s not you that put it on your shoulders, it’s the behaviours that were modelled and existing societal structures that built it up around you. That’s not to say that guilt shouldn’t exist at all, it’s what makes us recognise when we have done something to cause harm and correct for it in the future.

Try instead to think of guilt like an umbrella; using it only when it’s raining, and only then.

You can take the coat off.