Kibō - 希望 - Hope

9th May, 2025

Last night a friend of mine wrote a rather fricking good entry about... well, see for yourself. Love, mostly. Fall Out Boy. But also fear and guilt.

I'm not doing a summary of any kind, because frankly I couldn't do her words justice, and anyway it's right there.

But the part relevant here is that she described fear and guilt as two of the primary reasons why a person would feel undeserving of being loved, and thus push it away. She then wrote a paragraph summarising exactly what she meant by fear.

I sorta expected there to be a complimentary paragraph about guilt, but there wasn't. Not sure if that was the original intent, and the entry went off-track as they so often do, or if that just wasn't the important part to her.

Either way, guilt is a topic I feel rather qualified to write about recently, so here I am.

If you're reading this one - forgive my audacity, I hope. 💚

🐝 🐝 🐝

Guilt is quite often just fear in a different coat of paint. I strongly suspect that often, people don't directly feel guilt about many of the dubious choices they make - rather, it's fear of getting caught, fear of the consequences. Fear of someone knowing. But if the crime is never discovered, then perhaps you can continue on, blissfully free of any dark clouds.

On the other hand, this doesn't necessarily exclude remorse and regret from still being emotions that exist too. Perhaps the consequence you are so afraid of is someone you care about getting hurt, and you'd take it back in an instant if you could. It doesn't matter anymore that you thought your actions were morally justified at the time, not inherently worthy of guilt. Circumstances change, the unforeseen happens, and you end up wishing you could undo it all.

It sucks. I've been there, even recently. I'm not casting moral judgement against it - I think this can be a pretty normal, valid chain of human emotional reasoning. Nobody can see all ends, and we make mistakes.

But then... there's the more insidious kind of guilt. Harder to escape, harder to absolve. Probably the kind that is most responsible for that contradiction of rejecting the love you crave so much.

This is the guilt that comes from within you, independent of external perception. This is what you experience when you measure up your recent actions - or lack thereof - against the person you think you ought to be, and you find yourself wanting.

This is the one nobody likes to talk about, because exposing it to the world is terrifying, and there's startlingly little that can be done to resolve it from the outside anyway. You're not seeking anyone else's approval. Just your own. And we're so, so good at putting that outside our reach.

It's a form of cognitive dissonance, the unbearable conflict in your own head between what should be and what is.

...I've seen this manifest far too often in the people I care recently, not to mention myself. For every wonderful thing they do, the wonderful people that they are, all their saving graces and entirely reasonable faults, nevertheless the standard is perpetually just a little higher than that.

This isn't a case of feeling guilt because you've made some genuinely reprehensible choice that can't be rationalised - although I do believe that even the best people will fall into that trap once or twice throughout their lives; we all make mistakes, and then we work to remedy them.

No, this is a group of people holding themselves to somewhat-impossible standards. And please don't doubt for a second: I love them dearly for it. Every day I aspire to be more like my friends, in a million small important ways.

The kindness that it takes to see someone else in pain, a pain that you didn't cause, and say "I should be able to shield them from that. I should be able to shoulder some of it for them. I should be able to heal this hurt," is far more incredible than people give credit for.

And when you can't hold yourself to that standard, to be the bulwark and the salve that you expect of yourself... you feel guilt. You feel undeserving. You say "I'll do better" and you push away the helping hand, because to take when you should be giving is anathema.

...and I wonder if you realise that pushing it away only makes it harder to reach across that gap when next you try to raise them up.

Then there's me.

I'm not immune to any of this, not by far. Worse, I frequently see in myself that other thing I spoke of - someone who has made shitty decisions and hurt people for no good reason, in ways that are unreasonable and unabsolvable. So often, I feel inherently guilty, like my nature as a person is to always spoil things by saying something stupid, or more likely doing something much worse.

So often, I sit at the back of my own head and observe myself, wondering why I make the choices I make. It feels out of my control, but that's rarely an excuse. I feel like I am my best self so little of the time.

But... I'd be undermining my own point if I gave into those feelings. Even though it seems like a sisyphean effort to give myself the same goodwill and forgiveness that I have for others, I gotta. If for no other reason, then because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy otherwise. And I do still have too many things to atone for to give up trying now.

🐝 🐝 🐝

You might be wondering why this entry is titled 'Hope'. After all, it's mostly been about feeling shitty.

(It's probably also worth noting that at this point I took a roughly 6 hour break to hang out with someone on a Discord call, and I got rather tipsy in the process. Forgive any change in narrative voice-)

I have tried to keep a thread of hope woven throughout this entire entry. This is one of my enduring philosophies: It's quite easy to believe in something that's right in front of you. It's so much harder to trust that something is there if you can't see it.

But this is the nature of belief. This is the nature of trust. This is the nature of hope.

And, as both this entry and the one that it's a response to have discussed: I suspect a lot of the people I care about cannot see how much they deserve to be loved. I suspect this, because I feel it too.

So this is my hope:

You don't need to earn it.

You don't need to deserve it, any more than rain needs to fall, or the moon needs to wax and wane.

They just do. You just do.

And I hope that you can know that, trust in that, one day - regardless of whether you are the type of person who becomes held up by guilt and fear, or if you can trust in blind luck in the meantime.

Paradoxically, I hope I can one day too.

To be perfectly clear, this isn't addressed to anyone in particular. Sure, there are the four people I'm holding in my heart and mind right now, for whom it is intended from me as a person. But from me as the author of this entry, it applies to basically the whole world.

I think we'd all be doing a little better, if we let ourselves be absolved of our internal guilt. Because trust me, from experience... it's so much harder to change yourself for the better while you're weighed down by it.

So that's what I have to say, about guilt and fear and love. Apologies for such a ramble.

As for Fall Out Boy... I admit, I don't know as much of them as I should. But I did a little looking, for something that resonated. And I think I'll finish enjoying this album tomorrow.

Strike us like matches, 'cause everyone deserves the flames
We only do it for the scars and stories, not the fame
At least everyone is trying, everyone is shining
Everyone deserves the flames 💜