May God strike me down for not getting that perfect fucking job...!

I made a sort of breakthrough today. I often make mental breakthroughs but they rarely translate into emotional ones. I say something clever and noble about my situation and others', feel buoyant and wise, and go home and immediately begin sulking again.

Today I considered how I might NOT have fucked up my life; I thought briefly that the decisions I made may not have been the worse ones, but the only possible ones for me at the time. But it didn't really stick - that feeling that I'm all right, that my life has been interesting and I'm a resourceful person passed into abstraction and the habitual and dangerously unnoticeable heavy feeling of shame peculiar to the liberal middle classes who expect more and sometimes the impossible for themselves whilst defending the lower classes for their poor choices and bad luck, returned.

I discussed with Persephone this theory I have: that whilst we - the masses of liberal Europe - no longer fear moral condemnation of our sexuality, modes of dress and faith or lack of, the idea of moral judgement itself has not disappeared for some of us - it has been transferred to the far more mundane facts of our lives: the wrong job is a moral failure, the wrong choice of food, and schools for our kids is fraught with moral pitfalls. We see stern disapproval and scorn everywhere, usually where it doesn't exist. People are minding their own business and nursing their own wounds.

I blame Catholicism. That is too easy. I blame myself for wholeheartedly subscribing to these moralising terms of reference myself: "that mother who drives her ugly big gas guzzler is an evil woman and deserves punishment", and so on...