I need to get clean.

Unless you’ve experienced it, it’s hard to understand what it’s like. It’s a kind of guilt, but the word “guilt” doesn’t do it any justice.

The closest thing I can compare it to is a constant, unreachable itch. I can’t sleep, I can’t sit still, I can’t think straight. I’m constantly restless.

Or maybe an itch isn’t exactly right. It isn’t just an itch. Have you ever been covered in mud? It sort of feels like that. Like you’re covered in thick, itchy, heavy mud, and there’s nothing you can do to wash it off. You scrub and you scrub but you never get clean. And all you can think about is getting clean. The mission obsesses you almost every minute of the day.

That’s what I’ve been experiencing lately.

And this is starting to have less and less to do with my religion. We can all agree that hurting people is usually wrong, right? You don’t need to be religious to believe that. It’s a universal precept. So I don’t need my religion to feel consumed with guilt, seeing as how my moral failings usually involve hurting other people.

All I want is to get clean.

So the question is: How do you get clean? How do you balance your account? What can you do to make up for the bad things you’ve done?

Some people have told me that you do it by doing good things. But that’s not true. While it’s true that I should do good things, and should try to do as many as possible, doing so doesn’t erase my bad things. It just doesn’t work that way.

This might sound like a dumb metaphor, but…it’s like having a bag full of beans. You’ve got white beans and black beans. The black beans are bad things you’ve done and the white beans are good things. Your bag starts out empty, but you’re putting beans in it every day for your entire life.

Putting white beans into the bag isn’t the same as taking out the black ones. You can flood the bag with as many white beans as you want but you’ll still have black beans in the bag. You can only get clean by taking out the black ones. So how do you do that?

The answer is very simple, but not very pleasant. The only way to get clean is punishment.

It’s not enough to do good things. It’s not enough to just be sorry. If you hurt someone, then the only way to balance your account is to be hurt.

I don’t think there’s any way that someone can convince me that none of this is true. This system makes more sense to me than any other.

And again, if this were about my religion, I wouldn’t be thinking this way. My religion clearly teaches that all a believer has to do to atone for sin is repent (to God and to whoever you wronged) turn away from the bad deeds, and do good deeds instead. It doesn’t say anything about needing to be hurt.

I don’t believe in karma. I don’t think the universe is going to kick my ass for me. I think I have to do this myself. I have to punish myself so that I can be good and so that this guilt will stop torturing me. I’m going to make myself physically suffer in whatever way I can. It’s the only way.

What scares me, though, is the possibility that I’ll never reach my goal.

I already know that I’ll never be completely clean. That’s impossible. But I at least want to be clean enough that I can sleep, and think, and breathe, and not be consumed by the constant self hatred and restlessness.

I want to have that, and if I can’t have that, then I want to be dead.