Mea Culpa

Mea Culpa.



One of life’s victims.  That’s me.  A mean, perfectionist, nit-picky, Virgoan.  September birthday; not a good month.  Why couldn’t I have been born earlier, or later?  Anytime other than September.  But my natal passage into this world wasn’t my fault; I'll allow my parents to take the flak for that.  Let's face it I'm a victim of today’s fashionable blame culture.



    So Personal Responsibility is something I have a problem with, despite the strict religious notions of right and wrong planted into my childish psyche. Heck I even blame my parents for my being so smart.  Clever, and I mean really clever.  Always urging me to study, work hard ‘get to the top’.  So me, being an obedient child or to use the current jargon a ‘people pleaser’ I did, get ‘to the top’ I mean.  Double First at Cambridge, then a stint at Harvard, one thing leading to another. Not surprising I’m considered a success.  But not in my book.  Despite the accolades, inside I feel a failure; haunted by that familiar sickening fear that I don’t measure up to my own exacting standards.  A victim of my own success you could say.  You’d think by now I would have learned.  After all I’ve been in therapy for some years but they’re all the same, therapists I mean, useless; otherwise surely I could feel some remorse, guilt, regret.  But no.  The guilt is theirs.  They should have tried harder, been more sympathetic, more professional, better at their job.  I am not my fault.  I am a not my problem.  I blame the National Health Orange Juice and School Milk forced down my childish throat.



    A State Victim with no name and no identity. In the underworld of my creation there are no frontiers.  Zero tolerance for incompetence rules. I am the expert in constant demand.  For as I said earlier I have no qualms in admitting my abrogation of responsibility for my actions.  It amuses me rather, that others, not as successful as I, lay claim to the modern notion of ‘accountability’ and use their weakness to justify any failures or shortcomings in their pitiful nature.  These people are not victims, merely ineffectual coasters, barnacles clinging to the underside of the battered barge of life, afraid of risk.



    I ‘do’ risk; after all I've been trained by the best.  I’m talking real risk for real victims.  But once in my sorry life I fell into the trap of being a commonplace victim and risked a part of me that hitherto I had neglected.  I formed a, shall we call it an ‘attachment’ to another human being.  This part of my life still makes me feel, shall we say ‘uncomfortable’, because for the first time in my life I was not in control. My will subsumed by a totally reckless desire to share myself, to allow myself to be mirrored in someone else’s eyes.  I let myself down.  I became, or allowed myself to become a failure in my own eyes; Big Time. This dereliction of duty caused me to lose a year perhaps more, of my life.  Funny, even now I can taste the bitter-sweetness of the loss.  Oddly enough though, my Therapist at the time became quite excited about my reaction to the whole affair.  But after the strange madness left me, I was still infected with the sense of my own imperfection.  I hadn’t measured up well; to my mind at least.



  It took me another few months before I could contemplate any further projects. Despite even more assiduous attention to detail I found it impossible to shake off the memory of that September when I let myself down and felt remorse for the first time in my life.  But then I considered it too late for recriminations.  That route led me down paths my therapists urged me to visit, but I knew if  I allowed myself to go there I could never be the ideal victim I purport to be.  A double whammy as the saying goes.



    I realised then I could never allow it to happen again.  My career such as it was, was over. So I came here. Voluntarily.  I declined any further projects.  The state – my ‘state’ project leaders ‘understood my predicament.’ In my present state I was a liability to them and their aims.  You see because of my weakness, my one mistake, when I flipped the base metal of my own coin and landed heads up hand on heart loving another human being I was finished.  Done for.  I can’t go back for it seems I have a heart, I showed compassion for another and in my line of work that is the real killer, hardly the best recommendation for my career to date.  I’ve had time to do some reading whilst I’ve been resting here.  I’ve just come across the following by Oscar Wilde which seems relevant to me now for one reason or another.



“‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves, from all let this be heard. Some does it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword."



    It’s too late for me to go back though:  my therapist said that at the time I was, shall we say attached to someone, I made the mistake of mixing business with pleasure:  That was my ultimate downfall, my worst mistake, my greatest regret.  Mea Culpa.  I have a heart.