[533] No Apology

I’m not wrong. It’s the most fucked idea that I’m terrified to have. There can always be more to the story and nuances to a person’s character, but what drives them, what pushes me to cut them out of my life, it’s a force I consistently recognize. It’s a heavy and degrading force that likes to hide behind pleasant sounding words of no substance.

I regret deleting the texts. I got a little tipsy and started thinking about an old friendship that I severed. I sent an explanatory apology trying to relate my headspace and reasoning. If you’ll remember from Character Assassination, the worst thing in the world you can do when talking to someone is bother to explain yourself. All they want is waterfalls of contrition, and that’s certainly never enough either.

She called the apology mute, criticized how I went about it, claimed to care about our friendship but would simply have been too uncomfortable to discuss “my opinions” and choices about how to engage with the world. She cared about the friendship, just not enough to talk about or understand it.

There was a reason I stopped apologizing, and it had little to do with not feeling regret or sorrow. When you apologize to the wrong person, they only try to bleed you. They dismiss or downplay and criticize the nature of your apology. Their sympathies lie in the realm of platitudes and trickery. Lie being the operative word. They’re the saddest people I know, driven by the purest sense of pretension.

Without fail, I can go out and meet a, usually older person, who absolutely loves my energy, intention, or descriptions of the events of my life. Last night’s jovial soul told me I need to just bask in the glory of my own capacity for positivity. He, like others, told me I was doing alright and to not make it weird by concerning myself with trying to facilitate others. If I can speculate, I believe the heart of his words was about taking care of yourself more than a disavowing of empathy.

It’s a relatively straight forward and simple fact that as you pursue new knowledge and different voices, you undermine your general faith and convictions in the world. This uncertainty allows me to explore conversations with new people, explore things I previously had “strong opinions” against or about, and naively attempt to repent or downplay a course of action I made in haste. The trick is figuring out what remains consistent, both about yourself and the topics or people you’re exploring.

How do I feel confident a relationship is worth losing? Well, a year later when I’m moved to apologize, the response I get is precisely the kind of insulting joke that comprised most of our time together. I need to stop believing there’s anything that can be improved there. I’m the battered wife now, pouring my blackened eyes out knowing how much I deserved them.

The strength of any experiment is its predictive power and replicability. For social experiments, I feel like I never fail. I know who’s going to shit on me and how. I know if we were never really friends. I know how to get every word I’ve ever said thrown back in my face. I know how to illicit constant praise and reinforcement. It’s so fucking old. It’s so petty. It’s depressing as fuck.

But you can consider yourselves lucky. I’m growing more and more resolved each day. When you become the resentful “fucking downers” as my description went in my apology, who only shit on my ideas about the world with nothing but “talking about it would just make me uncomfortable” to hide behind, I’ll be happy to inform and dismiss you as well. You won’t get the drunk text a year later as an olive branch. I’ve run that experiment enough.