Scruples

You check. And check. And check again. A sentence you said today — was it too harsh? A decision you made last week — was it right? An action years in the past — did you do someone wrong with it? The thoughts do not come as questions. They come as interrogations. And you are always both the accused and the judge, the prosecutor and the witness.

From the outside it looks like conscientiousness. Like a particularly fine moral sensor. Like a person who truly takes things seriously. And in a certain sense that is true. Yet when conscientiousness no longer knows rest, when it dismantles you over the smallest things, when it robs you of sleep at night and of lightness during the day, you are no longer conscientious — you are being taken captive by an inner process that was once protection and has now become a cage.