Holding Yourself Accountable Doesn't Mean You'll Get Away With It
Sometimes apologies fail. Then what?
If this piece had a thesis, it would be this:
We choose chronic internal suffering over acute external discomfort, and often that choice persists even after we finally pay the price of admission. Redemption is not guaranteed, even when we own our failures.
I’m sure we’ve all been in a position or circumstance where our actions hurt someone we were close to, and we, regretfully, didn’t address it right away. If you’ve never experienced this, hats off to you, but I think most of us know the unbearable discomfort that we endure during that moment. We know that we’ve done wrong, and often we choose to pretend not to know, thinking that we’re protecting someone from something. I don’t know about you, but living in that kind of dissonance is a unique kind of discomfort for me. And yet, I kept choosing silence. I’ve done this many times before, and less and less as I’ve gotten older. I’m thankful that I’m not the same person I was years ago, but I’m also aware that that person is still me, just (hopefully) wiser.
When I’ve been in that situation, it’s a whole-body kind of suck. I sleep like crap, my mind wanders, my gut feels like it’s roiling perpetually. You would think it would be enough at some point for us to say, “God, I’m SORRY!” and do whatever is necessary to make the pain stop, and to resolve the situation. But life isn’t always that neat and tidy; just because you address it doesn’t mean that you’ve “made things better.” Often, you compound the hurt, complicate the admission, and compromise any chance of resolution.
This is all coming to mind as I think of a situation from my past - formative, to say the least, but also embarrassing and shameful.
Years ago, I worked at another job with other people. Let’s call one of them Elena. Elena was a fine person, but I was younger and dumber, so I wasn’t able to see the value of what Elena did; I just thought she wasn’t as good at her job as I was. I was taking myself very seriously then, still relatively new to sobriety and definitely feeling like I needed to prove myself to… well, everyone. Everywhere. So I wasn’t able to distinguish between the good I might offer and the good Elena might offer, even though we had different goals and experiences.
One day, I was in the office, messaging with my then-girlfriend, now my wife, about something I can’t recall. Simultaneously, I was messaging with Elena. She informed me that she was going to come in and get some work done, and also checked in with me. I responded nicely enough (I’m sure), but immediately switched to my girlfriend’s messaging window and wrote, “Gah, Elena is coming in. She’s the worst.”
Casually cruel. I’d like to say I had a good reason for writing that, but I don’t feel like I did.
Her response: “I’m sorry?”
I was confused. I’d vented lots of times to my girlfriend about Elena, and didn’t understand why she wouldn’t get what I was saying.
Her again: “Do we have a problem?”
I blinked. I could feel blood drain from my face as I read up into the conversation, looking for a reason why what I said would cause that reaction. I found it immediately.
I had not sent that message to my girlfriend. I had sent it directly to Elena.
“Oh, no, oh fuck, OH FUCK!” I screamed in my office. I was aghast at myself. I was embarrassed. I was experiencing many things that I wasn’t able to process properly at that moment. Unready and unwilling to own my mistake, I resorted to the only thing I could think of at the time.
Me: “Oh, that’s not what I meant. I meant...” fill in the rest with whatever you’d like. I don’t remember, and it’s not important in the specifics. What is important is that I chose to gaslight her, right then and there. I chose to attempt to convince her that what she had seen was not what it was. I chose to lie.
Why would I do that? I had been choosing to live a program of rigorous honesty (AA). I had said at any number of meetings that, while I experienced windows of sobriety during my stint as a drunk, I was rarely, if ever, honest. And so that’s what I was going to do – be radically honest. It was the obvious solution, right?
So why lie? I wasn’t protecting her at all. I was protecting my own perception of my self-image. I was protecting myself from having to admit my capacity for dishonesty.
I had built an image, an identity, of myself as someone who was professional. Someone good, not just at my job, but as a person. But if I’m being really honest, the identity was that I was better than.
The reality is that I looked down on Elena. She was older than I was, and she worked part-time, whereas I was more ambitious. I saw what I did and how I did it as not just delivering a better product, but making me better than her. And so my “venting” (because it wasn’t venting – it was casual, hurtful gossip of the worst, most pedantic kind) wasn’t about expressing frustration about anything; nothing Elena did affected me. In any way. No, it was about hierarchy. It was about establishing (to someone who didn’t need it established) that I was a better person than her. And not through meritorious action of my own, but through the denigration of someone else.
So of course I lied. It was the only course of action that allowed me to perpetuate the lie I was telling myself (and, through my actions, everyone else). If I could make her doubt herself – her experience of reality – then I could stay “the good one.”
I’d like to say it ended there. That things moved on. That my sin was just that lie. But it wasn’t. I kept going with it. For days, I kept the lie alive in my own mind and in my interactions with everyone else. But I couldn’t escape it. I saw Elena regularly (we worked together, for Pete’s sake). Every time I did, I was reminded of what I’d done, and I could see in her eyes and body language that she knew too. I would get a sinking, roiling feeling in my gut, threatening to unsettle whatever I’d eaten recently.
When I wasn’t working, I was worrying. I was worrying about the situation at night when I should’ve been sleeping. I was worrying about what she was saying to others about what I’d done: Did they know? Did they believe her? Was it possible to believe her? Did they think differently of me? The worrying didn’t help the uncomfortable feeling. It compounded it. Exponentially.
This was the worst part, really; I thought my lying would protect me from discomfort.
Instead, it was the discomfort. Constant, inescapable.
I only lasted a few days. I was in too much discomfort. I had to do something.
Finally, one day, I chased Elena as she was leaving the office. I had to apologize.
“Elena, wait!” I called out. She turned, looking less than eager to speak to me. “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I never should’ve written that. I’m sorry.”
She looked at me for a beat. Two. Then: “Okay, good.” And she turned and walked away.
I had done it. But I felt no better. This was not redemption. I hadn’t chosen the right thing to do for the right reasons. I hadn’t had some epiphany about being a better person, been struck dumb by the light of the Lord, and now could see my faults and the path to salvation.
No, I’d apologized because I was in pain, and I couldn’t stand it. Again, I was saving myself. And there was no redemption, no repair. Only acknowledgement, emotional collateral damage, and the damage control that is necessary.
My relationship with Elena never recovered. There was always the wall of my betrayal and lies between us, no matter how much I might learn from the situation and want things to be different. Even though I’d done (what at the time seemed like) the hardest thing possible: I’d admitted my actions. I won’t say I “owned” them, because that seems to ascribe too much virtue to my motives, but maybe I’m wrong; I’m trying to examine this without condemning myself.
I was a different person then, but I’m still that person now. Just hopefully wiser.
So maybe the question isn’t “how do we avoid making mistakes?” but rather, “how do we live with having made them, and with the ways they change things that can’t be changed back?”
I had to become curious about the reasons behind my actions and explore the reasons why I did them. My gaslighting was insidious, not just in and of itself, but because I was asking Elena to deny her own feelings, because protecting my own self-image was more important. My casual cruelty wasn’t just that, but built on a judgment I had of others relative to myself, and that I thought I was better than them. I had to admit that all of that was possible for the person I thought I was.
I can look back now and have empathy for that Sam. But I can also see how that Sam is still me; that capacity for cruelty and deception still exists within me today. I can’t separate who I was then from who I am now, but instead must acknowledge that they’re the same person along a continuum of time and maturity.
If you’ve read this far and you’re in the position I was, here’s my best advice:
Just apologize. But don’t be surprised if things stay broken.