I would give anything to be free of the knowledge of what I’ve done. I don’t know if it’s even guilt. It’s hard to feel guilt, when you don’t know if what you did had any real impact on others. I suppose I wronged a lot of people, in an abstract kind of way. But I don’t know if that’s what I feel bad about that, if it didn’t actually change anything for them. Maybe I’m in denial.
I think I mainly feel bad for me – being the one who has to live (or not) with what he’s done. Having to know what I know about myself. I don’t know how to cope with it, mentally. Being the villain in other people’s stories. Viewing myself that way – it’s hard to accept. But I can’t escape it. What do you do if you’re the monster (other than kill yourself)?
It doesn’t change much – recognizing that what I did, what I want to do, is wrong. Because it also feels so right. No huge lessons were learned, no greater moral clarity was reached. I did try. But my mind resisted. The evil was sunk in too deep. So it’s very wrong (morally speaking), but also very right (emotionally speaking.) And that contradiction exists inside my head, constantly driving me mad.
So I have to live with myself, as someone who shouldn’t exist. I should hate and despise myself, as anyone who knew me would. I shouldn’t want anything good for myself, because I’m complicit in something horrible that’s ruined the lives of others. And no matter what I do, this knowledge will never go away. There’s no escape. No peace.
I just want the awareness to stop.
No, that’s not true. I also want what I did to somehow magically be made morally acceptable. And it’s not. It can’t be. I will never be acceptable, and I will never be acceptable, especially as long as I still want that. I will never be ok. I want the impossible.
My biggest remaining question is: are there reasons why I’m the terrible person that I am? And is there a real way that things could have turned out differently? I don’t remember ever thinking ‘Aha, I’ll be evil!’ I think I did evil things because they appealed to me, and they felt good. I didn’t consider the morality of it, because I couldn’t see any consequences.