"Sorry"

If countries had national words, I think Canada's would be "sorry".

Not "eh", which is the stereotypical Canadianism. As is usual with stereotypes, "eh" is considerably less common in real life than it is in people's perceptions. "Sorry", however, is everywhere. It has given rise to another stereotype: that Canadians are exceedingly polite.
 
We are not. Well, not all of us. In Toronto, I can tell you politeness, let alone actual warmth from people, is in short supply. But even there, whenever any two people bump into each other, both will say "sorry", sometimes several times. It's comical...especially if you know both of them are thinking you #%^&ing $#$%%^^, get the @$^*( out of my way!ˆ

I get downvoted on Reddit every time I say this, but I have found that men and women say "sorry" differently, in general. Eva and I refer to it as "girl-sorry" and "boy-sorry". Boy-sorry is "I'm sorry I screwed up"; girl-sorry is "whether or not I had anything to do with why you're feeling bad, I'm sorry you feel that way".

Both of them have their uses. Both are hopelessly overused.

Personally, I tend to lean towards girl-sorry, now, and so I find myself saying that word quite often. There are a lot of people walking around  with a lot of chaos, self-loathing, turmoil and pain in their souls. Hell, I just got finished writing about the recently subsided storm in mine. I feel other people's pain. Even pain from people I don't care about; it shoots up by an order of magnitude when I love someone who's hurting. Depression in particular calls out to me, because it's something I have experienced myself.

Incidentally, I'm not stupid enough to think I've conquered depression: I have the sort of personality that's prone to it,, and as I wrote, depression is sneaky. But I am actively learning its methods, the flaws in my personality that it uses to sabotage my sense of self-worth. The biggest handle it grabs is my need to be needed: whenever that need is thwarted, depression is right there to say how worthless and unwanted and unnecessary I am. Start listening to that voice, and tattoos or not, before I can blink I'll be tossing around in an empty ocean again. I am trying very hard to recognize, whenever I feel rejected, how irrationally that rejection spirals: I can't see you today becomes I don't want to see you today becomes I never want to see you again  becomes I wish you'd never been born. See, I write that out like that it and it looks absolutely absurd. Beyond stupid. Laughable.

I think the pain of others is another handle, another soul-hole that...leaks. Because there really is a lot of pain out there, and taking on the pain of others comes so naturally to me...but it often seems that there's nothing much I can really do about any of it, and healing the entire world is as crazy as extrapolating I wish you'd never been born from I can't see you today. It's easy to feel that whatever I do, it can never be enough, therefore it's all pointless, therefore why bother trying, you're worthless and useless and, ah, go jump in an ocean.

There has to be a balance, and I would like that balance to tip towards empathic and caring without tipping me over. Hardened (a little) I may be, but I am nobody's cold-hearted bastard. Ideally, I'm seeking a way to still feel the pain of others without making that pain my own. I think this one might take a while.

I'm wondering if "sorry" might be a way to start. I mean, that word really is everywhere. And there are times it should go unaccepted, or be accepted provisionally.

When I was a kid, I was boy-sorry all the time. I'm sorry I screwed up. "Sorry" became a talismanic word, a word to automagically erase whatever I'd done. A get-out-of-jail-free card: invest the word with enough emotion and explain in a hundred words or so just how sorry you are and poof! all better. (The secret to success is sincerity! Fake that and you've got it made!)

It obviously doesn't work like that, you can't fake sincerity, because a sincere apology starts with a word and continues with some sort of concrete action.

I used to get a lot of "sorries" after getting kicked and punched and what not on the schoolyard. They were always delivered in that descending minor third taunt--why is that interval universal, I wonder?--that really added insult to injury. These days I don't get kicked and punched anymore because grown-ups don't usually act that way. But adults are very good at emotional assault, and not every rejection I suffer is imaginary. When a blanket rejection is accompanied with a rain of apologies, it sounds to me very much like that "sorrr-eee" chant. Not just insincere, but a kind of anti-apology. I meant to do that. I knew how much it would hurt you, and I did it anyway. 

Related thought: mistakes. A "mistake" is an action you undertake without adequately foreseeing the consequences. Now, sometimes you can't: none of us have crystal balls. But I've seen impaired driving dismissed as a "mistake". No. Impaired driving is always a conscious choice, and its consequences, while not inevitable, are common enough to be easily foreseen: that's why most people don't drink and drive. Most of the things called "mistakes"..aren't. Not in my books, anyway.

So yeah, I have trouble accepting apologies for deliberate actions that are clearly intended to hurt me.

That goes double when I'm the one deliberately hurting myself. Which I do entirely too often...and judging from the oceans of pain locked within so many people I know, I'm far from alone. Why do we do it? Why do we choose pain? Pain hurts. "No pain, no gain"? That's certainly one reason: I wonder if I could have come to what wisdom I have without having suffered pain, first.

Sometimes, pain is deliberately self-inflicted because it's better than numbness. People who do this are broken, and need more help than I think I'm capable of providing. If that describes any of my readers, please, seek that help. There are many states of being besides numbness and insufferable pain...and they're all better.

But most of the time, it's a cycle: we choose pain, we express pain, we get sympathy, sympathy puts fuel in the pain tank. I had a friend years ago who was exceptionally skilled at this: everything was about her (except the choices she made: she was curiously blind to every one of those), the world was out to destroy her, and she'd leech every bit of sympathy she could out of the surrounding crowd and demand more. It got to the point where I could actually close my eyes and see blood-red sympathy dripping from her protruding fangs. Every time I express some sort of pain to the world, I have to watch myself in a mirror, chewing on garlic with a crucifix in my hand, first. We all need sympathy from time to time, but to crave it is to be in some state between life and death. Undead.

In my merry roundabout way, I'm saying that feeling sorry for myself is absolutely wrong. Apology not accepted. Rather than wallow in oceans of self-pity (and trust me, I am intimately acquainted with those oceans), I choose to grab life preservers. I have two: music and writing. You'll have others.

Friends, lovers, family? Very few can pull you out of that ocean themselves. For one thing, they're battling their own monsters; for another, you're likely to pull them in with you (especially if they're anything like me, susceptible to pain.)  But they're there to help you find yourself, to help you discover your strengths. It's up to you to use them. You can lean on me...but I can't make you walk.

So this is my very public apology to those I love, who have been privy to this bout I've had with depression and self-loathing. I believe what I've written shows my sincerity; I believe the work I'm putting in here illustrates it further. Now that I seem to be on dry land, I'm learning how to put one foot in front of the other. And so I can say that I'm not feeling sorry for myself...instead I say "sorry" to myself for feeling that way, and resolve not to feel that way again.