Eight years ago I made a mistake. I harmed someone. I broke a heart.
Some relationships are toxic and broken and present as steel boxes padlocked with kisses in size just-too-small. A key or a welding torch and a clean or jagged, skin-cutting break can be necessary.
So some break-ups are unavoidable. Some are required. But some – one – are just stupid, a product of youth and optimism and an odd conviction that you can come back later, when you’re ready.
A friend once told me “you can’t put people in the freezer like leftover brownies and come back to them later.”
People and relationships don’t wait for you to be ready. Maybe you grow through relationships. Maybe relationships provide the context for challenging you to become a person ready for a relationship. Maybe we’re all fixer-uppers.
Maybe I was older then and I’m younger now. Now, my caution and my fears evaporate daily. Now I subscribe to (and make up) theories of bounce and and resilience and faith. Now I allow for mistakes. Now I embrace mistakes. Now I don’t have to get it right OR I WILL SURELY DIE. I’ve gotten it wrong so many times that wrong is a friend. We cuddle.
So now I don’t worry about relationships failing. It will be okay. I will be okay. A string of brief and broken relationships doesn’t mean that I’m bad at relationships – it means that I’m really, really good at getting out of relationships that don’t and won’t fit. Or stretch.
But this relationship was not that. This was it.
So I was wrong. I harmed someone and that harm was my shadow.
I’m wary of our culture’s addiction to addiction. I marvel at the way even those of us who aren’t in programs twelve-step our thoughts and our explanations. I’m even more skeptical about the universe as Santa Claus who rewards good little girls and boys who’ve read The Secret. I’m suspicious of absent apologies and doubt the necessity of forgiveness.
And yet. I was haunted. I did wrong. Somehow I needed to make it right, even though I couldn’t make it right. I kept thinking about making amends. I thought the earth required it in order to keep turning but really the target was my spinning soul.
Recovering alcoholics make amends. It is Step Nine: housecleaning. Action. People in the program contacting those they’ve harmed and acknowledge the wrong and ask how to make it right. Step nine is a nag.
I tried. I called. I called. I called. I called once a month for ten months. I thought, maybe I should stop calling because I’m possibly re-victimizing this person when he is forced to hear my messages saying please call me when he clearly doesn’t want to call me.
And yet the goddamned universe is a tyrant. She made me do it.
I called one last time and left a rambly, unprepared voice mail about what I did and how wrong and undeserved it was and that I was sorry and in fact that I am so sorry that even eight years later, I’m still thinking about it.
I did not ask for forgiveness. I think asking for forgiveness is like asking for a cookie. It is not yours to request. When you are wrong, you offer. You don’t ask.
Yet I was forgiven, lovingly, surprisingly, unreservedly.
And I am lightened.
_____________________
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
This was interesting, and well expressed. Would you have also felt closure if your apology was refused or rebutted? Would you have considered that an unsuccessful apology (an apology is not complete until accepted?) or would you have accepted that some things, once broken, cannot be remade?
[Reply]
Kelly Diels
replied:
on November 29th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
@Bruce Nunnally, Bruce, this might be another essay, in and of itself. Profound, beautiful questions. Thank you for asking them.
It didn’t have to be accepted or even acknowledged. (Rebutted might have shattered me, though.) That it was both accepted and acknowledged is an extraordinary gift.
“some things, once broken, cannot be remade”. I have no definitive answer about this. The optimist in me thinks that we are, with every breath, being remade. The survivor in me knows that sometimes there is just no going back. And maybe, like in a Venn diagram, there is a sweet spot where those two cells overlap and everything is possible.
Thank you for your provocative questions.
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Great sermon! Yes, I go to a very liberal church; why do you ask?
And this Law of Attraction and creating reality with your thinking looks to me like a secular version of pray for what you want and you will get it, aka the Prosperity Gospel. If you don’t get what you want, that’s because you didn’t pray hard enough, or you didn’t pray right. How clever of the inventor, to steal crap religion and foist it on everyone else.
[Reply]
Kelly Diels
replied:
on November 30th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
@Joyful, you are soooooo right. LOA is just the prosperity gospel, less Jesus.
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This is striking: “I’ve gotten it wrong so many times that wrong is a friend.”
I’m more of an ambivalent acquaintance, from opposite sides of the tracks. And I’m shaking off the ambivalence, even now, even now, even now.
[Reply]
Kelly Diels
replied:
on November 30th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
@Bryce, I AM MARRIED TO AMBIVALENCE. Is it cheating on me with YOU?
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I see ambivalence as a Joseph Smith. Many partners. No cheating. Totally legit.
See you in divorce court?
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Kelly, you’ve got good friends. They are right about putting people in the freezer until you’re ready for them. George Jones sang ‘I Stopped Loving Her Today’ about hurting someone and being hurt in return. Even though the subject of the song ended up in the cooler, I think that’s the hurt you write about so well.
You weren’t re-victimizing your ‘hurtee’ by calling them often, as much as you were stalking them with the best intentions. Someone I once hurt needed an explanation years later. She came to my high school reunion, to my apartment building, my work. Then we got together and had a nice talk.
I felt lightened afterward. It’s good to know others share the same sense.
Your post made me add this PS:
The young lady wanted me to know that she wasn’t some leftover at the dating buffet, so I told her she was the catch of the day at the nicest restaurant in town. The food references are accidental. The woman had gained over a hundred pounds since we’d dated, but she was still the sweetheart I remembered. That’s what I told her. I think it was the right thing.
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