Zoé

Zoé came for the second time. She paid the full fee again. You might remember her—she’s living with long Covid (https://yourstoryby.me/2024/06/10/zoe/).

Before we began, she smiled and asked, ‘Could you pull the blinds down? It’s very stressing for me.’
‘Of course.’

The light softened. My two dogs lay close to her. The cat hid behind the blind.

What’s guilt to you? How does it feel?
As if I’ve sinned against myself, and guilt is the need to atone, to align again with my principles.

What kind of principles?
I have a strong principle of justice and responsibility. If you do something wrong, you can’t just forget it—you have to take steps to correct it, to make it right. I don’t know… I’ve lived through many situations where people harmed me and never took responsibility for what they did.
Guilt is something I can feel even for small things. We were talking about eating something with dairy in it and feeling guilty. I think it comes from our personal way of treating people. I have an ex-friend because she manipulated me, saying, “Oh, you’re overreacting,” when she had done something terrible to me. She could never recognise that she did something wrong. If she had, maybe we could still be friends.

Can we blame someone for something they don’t see? (I think maybe I led her to answer no—with my voice, with the way I framed it.)
No, because they don’t have the same sense of guilt or justice. I tried to explain it to her many times, but it only got worse. She would hurt me even more. There was no shared sense of justice we could stand on.

You said, “it comes from our personal way of treating people.” What if I say, “it comes from the way we treat ourselves?”
Exactly. I’ve thought about that. And I realised that my friend actually hated herself. And to love the other, you have to love yourself. Maybe not perfectly, not all the time… but at least enough not to project that hatred outward. I don’t know if I’m being clear.

It makes sense to me that once you’re okay with yourself, you gain the capacity to turn away from yourself and toward the other. But I realised something else too: I have to treat others with more kindness than I treat myself, because honesty can easily become harshness. I’ve seen it in the moments I hurt someone with my straightforwardness, and it made me wonder whether I speak to myself the same way. When we evaluate ourselves, would we say the same words to a friend, or would we sit closer and offer support instead of calling them a piece of shit?
Yeah, yeah, she laughed. We want to love them and not leave, so we try to be nice to them and make them happy.
I feel like some people have a lot of empathy, and some just have a void. I was thinking again about this friend. She’s like a void: eating everything that comes her way, as if she has nothing inside her own life to hold her.

But look at dogs, for instance. They eat everything. Does that make them bad?
We’re different, at least in theory, because in our society we can survive without killing. I don’t know how I’d react if I were a dog watching a friend dog eat a bird. Maybe I’d just sniff the air and move on. Humans, though, have abused animals far beyond hunger, so I’m okay with animals eating whatever they want—even if they eat humans. I’m joking, a little. What I try to remind myself and others: let everyone live the way they want as long as it doesn’t cause harm.

The other day I was thinking about humans witnessing violence. One person feels bad and sees that it’s wrong; another becomes violent instead, maybe for the same protective reason. And I’m not sure we can choose which one we’ll be in the moment it happens to us.
Yeah. Do you express your violence, or do you stop it? Violence is a big thing for me. I grew up with it. My father was very violent toward me and my mother. I left home at 14 because I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I carried that violence inside me—maybe because I couldn’t defend myself back then. I realised that in some situations I was very prone to it. Once at school a guy was talking shit about me, and I told him to go fuck himself. He stood up and hit me, and I hit him back. I felt the violence inside me. I felt that I could have kept hitting him. But I hate violence. I don’t want to harm anyone. So when I recognised that violence within me, I decided I have to master it.