Hey -- I'm Done Being Sorry.

One of my good friends was in counseling in college.  And I remember her telling me that her therapist’s bottom line to her was: Stop apologizing.  Stop saying you’re sorry all the time, for everything.  And I remember thinking, shit, I do that ALL the time.  Apologizing when someone else bumps into me.  Apologizing when someone chooses to hold the door for me but I've rushed to catch it and ridiculously felt like I've inconvenienced them.  Apologizing when someone else was late, but I was early.    Apologizing when what I really should mean is, “You should be apologizing to me.”

Okay people.  I’m done saying I’m sorry.  And I’m done being sorry.  For shit I don’t have to be sorry for.

Let me explain.  And if you don’t like me, or don’t like my unapologies, or find it unacceptable that I’m putting this on the internet, here is your disclaimer: close this window now.  Because shit’s about to get real.

I’m not sorry for growing up with a family of whom I’m not proud.  My dad was extremely emotionally abusive, and this has only somewhat subsided since I counted the minutes until I turned 18 and moved to a different state.  I used to wish he’d just hit me (harder, with visible wounds) so that people would see and believe my invisible emotional pain.  I used to wish I could hide a tape recorder in the walls: him screaming, years upon years, “You bitch, I never want to see you again;” “I wish you were never born;” “How would you like to be put up for adoption?!  For me to make you go live with another family?!”  He’d make me sit in a chair for hours, while he stood over me, just silently glaring at me with fury for things I didn’t even know I’d done.  I used to wish I’d just get cancer or heart disease so somebody would validate the abyss in which I was floating, being dragged, at the hands but mostly words of a controlling, authoritarian, manipulative man.  My mom became an alcoholic, receding into her own fenced lair of marital denial and parental avoidance.  Never once did she raise her voice to him for my sister and me, other than her fleeing-to-another-room tears, to counter my father’s retribution on my sister and me of his own abusive childhood.  I will never be sorry for becoming a woman with assertion, a voice that will be heard, a refusal to kneel to a man’s word or world.  I used to scream at him growing up in defense of my mom or my little sister, and he’d hit me, and I’d keep screaming for them, even though no one screamed for me.  I’m not sorry that I laid in my bed day after afternoon after night, stoning my corporeal body not to convulsedly sob, but wondering if I swallowed every Tylenol on our bathroom shelf, if I could quietly die and rid myself of this pain.  I am not sorry for feeling all of this, and for re-feeling it now, or for telling you.

I’m not sorry for being an incredible student, for earning a full scholarship to a really fucking expensive prep school, for braining myself out of this hole.  I’m not sorry for being quiet in high school, studious, supremely likable if unpersonality-ed.  I’m not sorry for taking out a shit-ton of student loans to leave Pennsylvania and go as far away as I could manage, and even though Cleveland might not be paradise, I remember my family crying as they drove away from John Carroll’s campus, and not feeling anywhere close to tears.  I remember smiling, except for thinking of my younger sister, who was stuck back in that hell.  I’m not sorry about that feeling, but I’m sorry about leaving her.  It still haunts me every day.

I’m not sorry for screwing around in college, for embracing my new freedom and finding my wings (and pitfalls).  I’m not sorry for staying up late or for skipping class or for gallavanting with boys.  I’m not sorry for waiting until marriage until definitely not waiting until marriage.  I’m not sorry for becoming scary liberal Catholic, un-Catholic, and then sort-of, quantum physics, pick-and-choose Catholic.  I’m not sorry for being honors program, campus ministry, student service award kid.

Which then quickly transitioned into: can’t go to class, clinically depressed, cannot even begin to assess my life kind of kid.  I failed out of every single class my last two years.  I didn’t leave my dorm room for weeks, except to occasionally beeline to the campus counseling center, praying not to be seen or addressed in my running in my sweatpants there.  I hid from everything.  If I couldn’t champion it, I would avoid it.  The Ph.D. head of our counseling center told me that in his 15 years of therapy, my father was the most pathological person he’d ever seen.  In related news, my sister’s therapist at the University of Pittsburgh was concurrently telling her the exact same thing.  Funny how the universe aligns.  Six years later, I pulled myself through the last few classes I needed to graduate.  It was everything I thought I’d never be.  I’d never been more ashamed.  I remain never having been more ashamed.  And I’m not sorry about it.

I’m not sorry for struggling with my emotional pain, for scurrying to find a job, for ending up spending my days with kids with special needs, if only because at first I couldn’t find a job, but eventually because I have told myself (and continue to tell myself) that every child will do well when they can.  And perhaps I can’t undo some of the shit that happened to me.  But maybe I can tell a kid, without words, that what he’s going through is okay, and even if he doesn’t know what that means, maybe I can just sit next to him and help him fight it out.  And maybe sometimes I hate it, and maybe sometimes it’s really fucking hard.  And maybe sometimes it’s this cruel twist of fate, because I wish someone, anyone, in my childhood had sat next to me and said, “Hey…I don’t really get it, but I’m going to walk with you through it.”  And there are times when that is really hard for me to reconcile.  But you know what?  I’m not sorry.

I’m not sorry for pursuing boys.  For being decisive on who I like, and why, and doing something about it.  I’m not sorry for not waiting silently for a fucking awesome guy to approach me, because, guess what, I’m approaching him first.  And if a guy has a problem with that, we’re probably not going to work out.  I’m not sorry for holding out hope that someday, some guy will say to me, “Hey…I don’t really get it, but I’m going to walk with you through it.”  And I’ll need him to hold me, and breathe with me, and love me, but I won’t need him to save me, because I’m saving myself.  And I’m not sorry about it.  I’m not sorry for volunteering at the Rape Crisis Center, because keeping women strong and empowered and unashamed and unapologetic is essential to me.  I’m not sorry for tutoring a million hours a week, in order to have a place of my own, a life of which I’m proud, and an autonomy (read: lack of dependence) for which a monetary price is a silly absurdity.  I’m not sorry for not settling into a relationship or a marriage, because I will never, ever agree to be with a man who I find unworthy or who I don’t find strong enough to ask to sit with my pain.  I’m not sorry for thinking and reading and processing and synthesizing and asserting.  Someday I’ll get my life together and go to grad school, but I haven’t gotten there yet, probably because I keep apologizing to myself for my own uncertainties and insecurities and inabilities and inadequacies.  Note to self: work on that one.

I’m not sorry for making it my life’s mission to learn other people’s stories.  If I’ve met you, I want to know your entire life history.  I want you to tell me everything, and I want you to know that I’ll keep it in confidence, but the thing that lights me on fire and keeps me alive is the glowing, emblazoned heat of everyone’s story.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  Maybe because underneath, I yearn for someone to just ask me for mine, and then sit with it, and hold it, and tell me that my story is okay, and that they want to sit next to me anyway.  Aside: this hasn’t happened yet, at least intimately, at least lasting.  I want to write two books, of people’s stories, totally incompatible with each other, and one of which I’ll probably have to use a pseudonym for.  One’s about autism and one’s about sexuality.  Sorry, Mom and Dad.  Or not.

I’m not sorry for loving and losing the one person (man) who accepted me through all my pain.  I’m not sorry for continuing to mourn the loss of the only relationship who never abandoned me; until he did.  He found someone else who was less injured, or, at least took out less of her injury on him.  And there is the one thing I actually am sorry for: for ever placing my emotional pain onto anyone else.  And then finding myself even more alone than I was in the first place.

So I guess I lied.  I am sorry for one thing.  And that is for any moment where my own pain translated into my unkindness to another.  I feel it in my soul the second it leaves my body, and I shrivel a little bit inside.  If I could make one wish to the universe right this second, it would be that I would never harm anyone else because of being harmed.  I can’t guarantee that this won’t happen.  But I want it to go on the record that if it does, that is the one thing for which I will eternally be really, completely sorry.

But for everything else: I’m not sorry.  One of my best friends was listening to my whining about a boy the other day.  I told her, “You know what?  I realize I like the really intense boys.  The boys who are wild and passionate and stand for something and aren’t afraid.  The boys who have a history and a reflection and a spark.” And she said to me, “Alexandra, you like them because it is what you know.”  And she’s right.  Jack Kerouac may have said it best in On the Road: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

So here is the part where I tell you I’m going to continue to live, and burn like candles exploding.  And I’m going to keep searching for people who not only live like that, but also permit, support, encourage, me to live that, too, and to say it, feel it, remember it, create it, imagine it, reconcile it…and not for one minute, one second, be even a little bit sorry.  Unless I need to be, because I’ve been hurtful.  And then those kindred people I’ve found, they’ll help me fix it, and make it right to the universe, and then keep right on burning, with them at my side, while we hold each other’s pain, and transform that indestroyable energy into mutual radiance and grace, together and exponetially and unapologetically.