Sorry for the slow reply. Sorry to bring this up again. Sorry, I know you have heard all this before. Sorry to be a nuisance about the parking.

On Friday we sat with the friend who stopped calling. This is the part that tends to come next, and it is harder to spot, because it happens in your own handwriting.

Somewhere along the line you started paying a small toll before you were allowed to need anything.

An apology is meant to do a specific job. Something went wrong, you had a hand in it, and the word repairs the damage. That is a decent transaction, and it works.

What you have been doing is a different thing wearing the same word. Nobody was wronged when your body made you cancel. Nothing was damaged when you asked the nurse to repeat herself. The apology is not repairing anything, because there was no injury. It is paying for permission.

It is worth asking where the toll came from, because it was taught rather than chosen. Many women learn early that being easy to have around is the price of being welcome. Illness makes that impossible to keep up. You cannot be easy to have around while you are cancelling, rescheduling, asking, and needing the chair by the door. So the apologies multiply to cover the gap, and they land on you as evidence that you have become a problem.

You have not become a problem. You have become a person with needs that are visible, which is a different thing, and considerably less popular.

There is one place where this costs you something concrete. In appointments, the apology usually arrives attached to a softener. Sorry, it is probably nothing, but. I know you are busy, so I will be quick. That softening cuts the symptom down on its way out of your mouth, and the person across the desk receives the smaller version of it. Say the whole thing plainly, at full size. That is not rudeness. That is clinical information, and it belongs alongside everything else your doctor is working with.

So here is the question to carry into the week:

Today’s Practice

One day of noticing, then one small swap. Nothing confrontational.

On a hard day, pick one message and delete one word before you send it. That is the entire practice, and it still counts.

What the Research Says

One often-cited study asked people to record offences and apologies in a daily diary. Women reported apologizing more, but the difference was not about willingness. It was about the threshold. Women in the study classified more of their own behaviour as offensive in the first place, so there was more to apologize for. The sample was small and drawn from students, and the work is fifteen years old now. Still, the finding is worth holding. The problem may not be that you apologize too readily. It may be that you count too many ordinary things as offences.

Everyone’s Talking About

Inner child work is everywhere at the moment, and this question tends to lead people straight to it. The clinical roots are respectable enough, and working with the part of you that learned these rules early is a recognised approach inside proper therapy. The internet version is looser. It can slide into treating every present difficulty as a wound to be excavated, and excavation without a trained person in the room can leave you worse off for a fortnight. Curiosity about where a habit came from is useful. Full archaeology is a job for someone qualified.

From the Old World

In Ireland there was a practice called meitheal, a group of neighbours who moved from farm to farm to bring in the harvest or cut the turf. Nobody apologized for the day the group arrived at their own gate. Help was structural rather than personal, a rotation everyone stood inside, and receiving it carried no debt because your own turn was coming. That arrangement has mostly gone. The assumption underneath it does not have to go with it.

Come Home

Five lines, and you can say them in the voice you use for reading recipes.

One act for today, if you want one. Find one sorry in a message you have not sent yet and take it out. Send it anyway.

You are not a problem to be forgiven. You are a person who needs a chair by the door.

P.S. Tomorrow, a verdict on cortisol face, and whether the puffiness you see in the mirror at seven in the morning tells you anything at all.