When I was twenty-one years old, I declined a monumental apology.
If everyday apologies – oops sorry, I bumped you with the cart, oops sorry I cut you off at the intersection, oops sorry I accidentally had sex with your room-mate – are pleasure crafts, this apology was a freighter. A tanker. A leaking oil tanker about to slick up some helpless sea-life and require flotillas of volunteers, enormous donations and teams of public relations professionals to clean up.
Not only did I refuse the apology, I declined to offer an audience to even hear the apology.
Yet in that decision there was no malice. There was no vengeance. There was nothing. I had been wronged as a child – sadly, habitually, sexually wronged – and now an apology was being offered to my adult self. And I didn’t need it. It was over. As a six year old, as an eight year old, as a ten year old, the only thing I needed from anyone was for someone to make it stop. But as an adult, I had made amends for myself, to myself, and I was fine. I was neutral. I needed nothing from my abuser: no apologies, no explanations, no reparations, no reconciliation. Nothing.
I didn’t need the apology, I didn’t need vengeance, or justice, and I didn’t need to offer forgiveness. Not even for myself.
Forgiveness is a slippery fish. There exists the idea that forgiveness can be offered, like a plate of cookies, or maybe a shot of penicillin, or a priestly palm to the forehead, to cure what ails you. There exists the idea that granting someone forgiveness can help you to release your pain and cure yourself: that forgiveness is, possibly, a selfish act of self-care.
I’ve wondered about that, this week. I thought about apologies that I’ve received and grudgingly accepted, which is not acceptance at all, and apologies I’ve greeted with a tongue-lashing. I wondered about the right way to apologize, to hear an apology, to receive an apology, to accept an apology. I wanted a formula for achieving authentic graciousness, accountability and magnanimity.
I have been struggling to remember a formula I forgot that I knew by heart when I was twenty-one.
Maybe there is grace in refusing to engage in an awkward social show that, deep-down, you don’t require. Maybe it is generous to return the gift to the giver and say:
here.
here is the harm you granted me.
it is for you to intimate and decipher.
the only relationship to be decoded and repaired is yours with your actions.
the pain has passed.
it is nothing to me.
Maybe forgiveness is not mine to give. Maybe asking it of me, at all, is asking me to right your wrongs. Maybe forgiveness is a journey you take, yourself, with yourself. Maybe that is the only path that leads to peace. Maybe what I offer – the nothingness, the absence of any need to inquire, to understand, or to accept – is the meaning of magnanimous, itself.
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one of apologies I was waiting for should have been from the Very Bad Lying Man, but this essay is part of The Sorry Series – How To Apologize, How NOT to Apologize, and the Power of Forgiveness:On Harm, Healing, Ceilings and How Absent Apologies are the Pits – The Sorry Series, #1
Guest Post by Josh Hanagarne: Three Lame Types Of Apologies – The Sorry Series, #3
The Forgiven, The Sorry Series #5
*not really part of the series but I do make a wildly necessary apology in it
I think a lot of people feel like forgiveness means you forget the problem and go back to a perfect relationship. I think forgiveness is more about being able to live without hatred and fear, hating the person who wronged you and fearing it will happen again. An apology doesn’t fix anything and to anyone out there that is waiting for that magical moment when some heart felt words will turn back time and take the hurt away…. don’t hold your breath, the only thing you can change is your future, so take control of that journey.
On another note, you are one strong woman with so much to offer the world, and I think you have total control of your life. Your girls will only benefit from your strength and experiences.
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yes, Monica. And maybe if we let go of the idea of the ‘perfect relationship’ then we release the fear – of damaging that perfect relationship – too.
Or maybe we need to call some gurus and yogis and mages and priests and imams into this argument. I don’t have the answers…just feeling around for them in the fog. This is life. So glad we were blessed with the imagination to comprehend it and bend it.
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Wow!
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To take the shit life hands you, and use it as fertilizer for your own growth – THAT is personal power. Yeah, baby!
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suddenly I feel the need to plant some flowers and pretty up the place
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I’m sorry, Life. I didn’t mean to pin that one on you. Please forgive me.
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takes a lot of vulnerability. thank you…
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Well said and so very very very true. The only path to true forgiveness is to forgive yourself.
Thanks for the wisdom!
B
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