dear hilary: the solitary inch

Dear Hilary,I'm sorry. I say I'm sorry probably approximately 218 times per day. I say it to basically anyone about basically anything. It's my catchall, my secret weapon. Say I'm sorry and then the conflict can end, right? But lately I've started to hate the word sorry. I use it when I don't think I mean it. I use it when I'm just tired and want to not be having the conversation anymore, when the explanations for myself run dry or I don't know how to justify being sad or being angry or being any of the emotions I've spent my whole life putting in the, "THIS IS DANGEROUS LOCK IT IN A BOX" category of my heart. I don't know what to do. I am mad at myself for being mad at myself, or sorry about how often I say sorry. Help?Love,I'm sorry for even asking thisDear I'm Sorry,Hey love.Been a little while since you've let all that out, eh?Or maybe just a few days, if you're like me, and you sit in the counselor's office and say the same things week after week, that you don't know how to build a person who believes in herself as herself because the habits run deep, habits of denial and apology and habits of self-deprecation and self-doubt, habits of keeping those emotions at bay so that now they loom out at you in the night and  you really didn't feel like you had to apologize about that thing you said or worried about or over-thought, but you did and now you don't know how to take it back and you think you'll always be like that, always the one in the wrong, even though yes you know that it's supposed to be shared and aren't you just a failure for not sharing it better, eh?Sound familiar?It's an agonizing discernment, when we've done wrong. We avoid it, all of us. All. Of. Us. You included. Yes, I bet you didn't see that coming. I didn't either. I assumed for the longest time that I was the only person in the world who was able to be accurate about what was her fault - everything. Every fight. Every misunderstanding. Every agony.And in doing that, I built the safest protection of all: protection from the truth.Because here it is, the uglier truth: by apologizing for everything when you know perfectly well not everything is actually your fault, you've excused yourself from really owning your wrongs. You've allowed yourself to think that there isn't really anything wrong with you except the deliciously dramatic EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE and so by doing that, you're keeping the real work, the work of looking at a fight and saying, "that was ugly and fierce and mean" at bay. You try to take the whole thing into yourself and in doing so you sneakily get your fix of absolution. You get the control back. You get the safe feeling back.Let's be free of that, shall we?You will have done some things very wrong in this life. You will have done some things very right. Sometimes you will fight a good fight and at the end you will both cry and rage and not be sure how you made it through but you did. And sometimes you will stay in the same place and some times you will need to gather your courage like a fur coat around you and plunge into the winter of being risky and vulnerable and not say sorry as a way to escape the fight but only say it after you've fought longer and harder than you want to know the truth, to live the truth.Most days it will be only one single solitary inch of work. Most days it will seem like nothing, like you're still doing what you've always done, falling back into saying "sorry" as a way to make it all better or make it all go away (or make it all belong to you). Most days being in a fight will still terrify the living crap out of you and you will think, I am going to die. But you are not. You are going to live.You are going to live more gloriously, too. With every solitary inch of work. With every moment of saying, "Am I sorry? Is this mine?" you move. You move that inch and that inch is full of glory.I've long given up the ghost on becoming "perfect" at not being a perfectionist. I am one, and it moves and lives, and the solitary inch has to be full of glory because most of the time that is just what we can do. It is glory-full, even when it isn't done exactly right or you still apologize too much or you're still kind of controlling.Every solitary inch of work we do is glory-full.Love,hilary