No Regret

I have deep and genuine remorse for the things I have done ine the past, but no regret. For me regret ends up being just an excuse for what I did. It causes me to believe that I am a bad person, hence I have no choice but to do bad things. Genuine remorse does not allow such beliefs. Because of my remorse I know I'm not a bad person, so I have no excuse for doing bad things. I must accept full responsibility for what I have done (and for what I do). This doesn't make me a good person either; it simply says that I'm not bad, or evil, or unlovable – especially not unlovable.

I did the terrible things I did in the past (kidnapping, rape and murder) because of my regret, which had convinced me that I was a bad person. I didn't like believing I was bad of course, so I did everything I could to put responsibility for my misery and shame onto society, which perceived as the source of all my suffering for purely rational reasons. This would make my regret go away temporarily, but as soon as I stopped pushing my pain (and responsibility) away it would always came back again. I have since realized that responsibility can only be either accepted or rejected personally. It can never be put on someone else without their consent. (I now call the attempt to make others take responsibility for anything, the Blame Game.)

But, I don't believe I'm a bad person anymore. So I no longer have any reason to feel regret, or any need to blame other people for my pain and suffering, or behavior. Not even myself, since self blame is ultimately just another way to avoid responsibility (self blame leads to regret, not remorse, and hence more negative behavior, not responsibility). Now I have only remorse, and the forgiveness that comes with it (i. e. love), which is all I need.

The only reason I have remorse at all is because I found and accepted real forgiveness (not the Christian variety). What I mean is that someone essentially said to me (not necessarily with words, but certainly from the heart), „You are not the bad person you think you are.” This, I now realize, is THE message of forgiveness, and my heart somehow managed to receive it, even though my eyes were blinded and my ears were defeated by deeply ingrained fear and ignorance (i. e. hate). And somehow I also believed it, even though it went against everything I had been told all my life.

I realized that I really wasn't a bad person after all. I had lived nearly my entire life believing a lie, and supporting that lie with many many other lies. So when that base lie fell to the light of the truth, all the other lies fell with it. My entire „world” (i. e. belief system) collapsed like a house of cards, and I literally bawled like a newborn infant from the sheer shock of being exposed to a whole new reality; a whole new truth; that I wasn't bad, and that I could in fact be loved for the person I was beneath the mask.

I don't suppose I'll ever be able to fully describe what a shock this realization was for me. I had believed for so long that no one would ever love the real me, so I had to fake who I was just to get people to accept me. But know I knew I didn't have to fake, or lie, anymore. I could remove the „bad man” mask, and if no one liked the real me it didn't matter anymore, because I was lovable, and I was loved.

At first I thought that „someone” was Shasta, the little girl who I had kidnapped in order to rape and murder (in my mind I was giving „society” a taste of its own sickness). But I quickly realized that she was only a conduit for the love I felt. The love I experienced through her came from an infinitely deep reservoir that her innocence and purity made her the perfect channel for. We worship a child's innocence because it allows us to glimpse this deeper love, but the love is not in the child, it's in all of us, and it's in the world.

This love was the cause of my remorse, and it was this love that compelled me to pick Shasta up and take her home. I let myself get „caught” because it was the only way I could be certain that I would not hurt anyone else. I did not confess out of guilt or shame, or because I wanted to be punished. I simply no longer feared the System, or even death. I knew I would probably be sentenced to die because of my crimes, I even told Shasta so on the way back to her home city. I told her that it didn't matter what they did to me; it only mattered that she was safe and with her father where she belonged.

I cried for days straight after I surrendered to the police. I spent many hours curled up in the fetal position on the floor of the jail cell I was put in, because the cold hard concrete gave me a comforting sense of contact with reality in an otherwise pain filled universe. I was loved! I was loved! And it hurt so much!

Only forgiveness and love can beget genuine remorse. Condemnation and punishment can only compel a person to feel regret, which is often mistaken for remorse. But regret is only concerned with ones own misery, and out punishment based justice system makes sure that's all anyone ever feels. We even reward regret, by giving criminals who „lawyer up” much lighter sentences, if they can be charged at all. A man who remorsefully turns himself in and freely confess will invariably have the book thrown at him. My own lawyers told me not to confess to my crimes in other states because of this, and because they wanted to use those crimes to bargain with. I told my attorneys that I would not allow such „bargaining” with the truth, and I confessed against their advice. I told my attorneys that the truth was not a commodity to be bargained with; it is a living and intelligent entity, that wants to be loved and acknowledged. My confession was an acknowledgement of the truth, nothing more, and I have been experiencing the consequences of my confession ever since, getting shipped from one jurisdiction to another to have the book thrown at me over and over again. If I had taken my attorney's advice I could have settled all my cases (crimes) at once and gotten life without parole instead of three death sentences (or more, if Washington State ever decides it wants to join in the Blame Game).

But, I still don't regret my confession, or my crimes. Because they are the Living Truth, that only wants us to know we are loved. Yes, my crimes are the truth too, as much as any other truth. They are an „ugly” truth, but if we deny the ugly truths then we deny all truths. Because in the end there is only One Truth, and no regret.