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I’ve learned that many of the rules that apply to good writing and storytelling also apply to life. For instance, when writing personal essays or memoir a writer should never brag, complain, or apologize. Why it’s a good idea to avoid bragging or complaining away from the page is probably obvious enough. Apologies, however, are necessary in every relationship. Everybody screws up now again, everybody loses his patience, judges, whines, or blames. A sincere apology can go a long way to mending whatever rift that screwup might have caused.
Yet it was writing a personal narrative, where apologies are entirely inappropriate, that actually taught me how to give a sincere apology. Every story has a problem, a source of conflict. Sometimes the root of that problem seems to be how other people are treating me, whether it’s publishers rejecting my work or other boys hassling me on the playground.
But other times my behavior is the problem. For instance, I’ve written frequently about being a parent, and some of those stories involve me losing my temper with my boys. These are not my proudest moments. As much as I might worry what the reader will think of me as a father, at no point in my story can I say, “I know I shouldn’t have done this,” or, “I know it was wrong,” or, “I feel terrible that I did what I did.” This is just my way of signaling to the reader that I really am a good person despite what they are about to read.
No, my only job is to accurately portray what I believed to be true when I lost my temper. I never do anything for no reason whatsoever. No matter how obnoxious my behavior, it always seems justified or necessary in the moment. I yell because I think they’re not listening and so maybe I just need to be a little louder, or because it seems like those little stinkers think they’re in charge, or, sadly, simply because they’re public behavior’s embarrassing me.
Inevitably, I learn that I needn’t have yelled. I learn they had heard me but didn’t like what I was saying, or they didn’t think they were in charge of the house but knew they were in charge of themselves; or that it’s never their fault if I’m embarrassed by what they’re doing. That’s the arc of every valuable story I’ve ever told: a misperception corrected through experience. My behavior was never the product of some inescapable character flaw. All that was ever “wrong” with me was that I believed something that wasn’t true, and beliefs can always change.
Which is always what I must remember when I apologize to my wife or my kids or anyone at all. For years I wasn’t comfortable apologizing because it seemed like doing so required I admit I had committed a kind of sin. I apologized in the hopes that whomever I had offended would offer me absolution with their forgiveness; like court judges, my future lay in their willingness to offer leniency for my deserved punishment. They and they alone could return my good personhood to me.
I hated this arrangement. My goodness, my worthiness of love, was, like freedom itself, too valuable a commodity to allow someone else to give or take from me. Within the true apology is an awareness of my inherent innocence; I was born with it and I’ll die with it. If I have been guilty of anything, it’s forgetting within the fever of fear that this is so–for me and for everyone.
So I apologize. I say, “I thought this, and then I did that, and I’m sorry if what I did frightened or hurt you.” I don’t, however, ask for forgiveness. For a true apology, I have to give that forgiveness to myself first. To do otherwise is to turn that other person, whom I have already mistreated, into a judge. This would be further mistreatment. It feels as bad to judge as it does to be judged.
But if I forgive myself, which is really just remembering who I am, I give the other person a greater opportunity to do the same. They don’t want to see me as some kind of enemy, a broken person who can’t be trusted. To believe such is to live in an unfriendly world. Lift the veil of judgment and guilt and sin, and there is the kinship natural to us all.
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