What I’m sorry holds—and what it cannot
The heaviness of apology, the desolation of its failures, and the embodied work of repair
I skimmed all those Substacks, but here I am asking for your deep reading of mine. I’m sorry! It’s awkward, isn’t it—this currency of I’m sorry: I’m sorry you didn’t get the job. Please tell your sister you’re sorry. I’m sorry you don’t understand why this is important. We ask a lot of those seven letters. We say I’m sorry to attempt to right a harm. We seek forgiveness. We use it to mean I see you. Sometimes we say it and don’t even mean it at all.
I hurt you—I’m sorry
I imagine you have experienced a version of this: Your partner texts late in the afternoon, “reminding” you about dinner with friends. You have had an intense few weeks of work and were looking forward to destressing in the gym. And you don’t especially savor time with the couple she mentions you are meeting for dinner.
When did we plan this? you text.
I told you last week, she texts back.
No, you definitely did not, you reply, becoming irritated.
And then it spirals beyond the I did, no you didn’t conversation into a rehash of your unrecognized feelings of being repeatedly dismissed and her frustration with your frequent need for space. You feel invisible. She feels excluded and disconnected. You call and yell in anger that you are going to the gym tonight and she can have fun at the dinner she never bothered to run by you. But, as soon as you hang up, you immediately regret the nasty tone that you know she will hold onto for weeks, waiting for the moment to remind you of your surliness.
Your reflexive attack was out of bounds, but her curt hang-up was an add-on to an endless open wound. It’s true, you did intend to hurt her. But in hurting her, you know—at a deeper level—you were trying to signal your sense of invalidation to her. Your raw emotions provoked you to respond the way you did, without thinking of their effect, and so you call her back in an hour: “Hey, I’m sorry. Probably you did mention the dinner and I wasn’t really listening. I know I’ve been so wrapped up in work stuff lately.”
You offer words wrapped in both guilt and surrender. She accepts and the two of you move on, hopefully at some point addressing the deeper core issues that live at the center of all of your relational conflicts. We collide with others, our pain and fear a part of that collision along with our love and excitement. Continual repair is what matters.
But there is another common use of “I’m sorry” that signals empathy rather than apology. Consider this scenario: Your colleague is sitting slumped at his desk. He mindlessly organizes papers into piles without even checking to see what they are all about. Clearly, something is wrong. When you get a chance, you pull him aside and ask if he needs to talk. He proceeds to explain how a woman he used to date is getting married. He just heard last night from a mutual friend. He feels she was someone special, someone he will never meet the likes of again. Yet, at the time, he could not commit to her. He wasn’t ready — timing getting in the way as it often does. And now he aches through and through. He knows he has lost something irreplaceable. He pauses and finally finds himself able to lift his eyes to meet yours. You look at him supportively and say, “I’m sorry.”
Just as suddenly, his air turns disappointed. He turns away back to his desk and starts re-shuffling the papers hastily and cursorily. “It’s not your fault,” he brushes off your attempt at sympathy.
Sorry, not sorry
I’m sorry can close doors as often as it can re-open them. I’ve often wondered why there are such divergent reactions to this gentle, heart-opening phrase. I recall my grandmother having an article posted on her fridge after her daughter had died in an accident. It listed all the things not to say as messages of condolence. I seem to remember “I’m sorry” as being one of them.
I’m sorry can even express its opposite—a total lack of regret as in William Carlos Williams’ poem, This Is Just To Say:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Perhaps some of the problem emanates from the fact that we, as English speakers, possess a truly limited number of phrases to address situations that are vastly different in need and response. The sociologist, Erving Goffman, categorized these phrases (including I’m sorry, Excuse me, Pardon me, etc.) as part of “remedial interchanges.” Basically, these verbal gestures are the first steps in repair whereby we acknowledge a transgression of social norms. Whether that violation was directly linked to you or not is where things get messy. In their article about the difference between I’m sorry and Excuse me (and related challenges of explaining these differences to those for whom English is a second language), Ann Borkin and Susan Reinhart summarize their interpretation of the murkiness of the phrase, I’m sorry:
I’m sorry is basically an expression of dismay or regret about a state of affairs viewed or portrayed as unfortunate by the speaker. It is not necessarily tied to occasions in which the regrettable state of affairs is the responsibility of the speaker; it is not necessarily tied to situations in which the regrettable state of affairs adversely affects the addressee; and it is not necessarily tied to situations in which there has been, or might be, an infraction of a social norm. In short, I’m sorry is not necessarily a remedy, as Goffman defines the term.
How then can we express sympathy without being misinterpreted or misunderstood to be claiming fault? Or worse, how do we avoid the assumption we have offered something compulsory with no meaning at all? How can we express remorse for something outside of us—something that happened between two unrelated humans, but that we recognize to be deeply human…or something that we witness someone having to endure, something painful or isolating, something demeaning or dehumanizing?
These are not the sorts of I’m sorry’s that intend to express responsibility. They yearn to voice compassion, empathy, shared humanity, fallibility. They long to say I too know what it is like to be human—to be ever rooted in dirt, only momentarily glimpsing something passing through the clouds. Arguably, we rarely say it to those most needing the care, ourselves.
I feel it, I know it, I carry it
I don’t know as many languages as I would like, but I do speak enough French and Spanish to get along. I have always appreciated the Spanish phrase, lo siento, as a much better way to express empathy and to distinguish this kind of support from an attempted remedy implying fault. The best translation I can give for lo siento is “I feel it.” Indeed, this expression seems to capture more adeptly what we often want to communicate when we say I’m sorry. I feel it. I feel your pain, your humiliation, your mistakes, your regrets. I feel it and them and you and, very simply, I am here for you, as a human who goes through the same things. Whereas the English I’m sorry conflates responsibility with feeling, Spanish splits the two allowing regret to be expressed without fault. In short, it conveys an intimate simpatico, just what is needed in moments of weakness, fear, or doubt. For it is in those moments that we feel most alone.
Other languages succeed at this separation where English blurs. In French, je suis désolé has the same common usage meaning as I’m sorry, but the literal translation is I am desolate, devastated even. As one commenter speculated in a thread exploring the term: “Typically, desolate would indicate ‘severely lacking.’ Like the desert is desolate of water. Sometimes it also means there are no people—this town is deserted and desolate. It might be one of those times where direct translation doesn't work well. Because, in English, we don't use desolate as something you take accountability for or have even done wrong with.” You can translate meaning, or you can translate words. Indeed, both are significant, but what lies at the core of a saying is equally as important as the semantic shifts that do not consciously recognize the memory hook. It is still there—the desolation, the desertion, the empathy with all that is “severely lacking” in a world where apology itself feels rarer and rarer. Where does our capacity for empathy lie? Is some of it, sadly, lost to language itself?
The Japanese are considered to have an “apology first” culture. Apologies are easily and generously given, and forgiveness just as quickly accepted. In addition to having multiple ways to verbally express apologies and remorse—all with subtle differences reflecting the seriousness of the event, the formality of the occasion, and the position of the addressee—the Japanese use a variety of bows in place of speaking apologies. While the bows are plentiful enough to create a parody, the ability to express regret, fault, or empathy through physicality is attractive to me. The bow expresses our humility and simultaneously brings us closer to the intended receiver. I am humble before you—not out of guilt, but because I am human. I have always thought that the phrase from the Bible, “The meek shall inherit the Earth” does not fashion the meek as submissive and spineless; rather it implies a meekness aligned with gentleness, humility, and tolerance. The most human kind of qualities. The kind of qualities we seek to embody in our very best moments.
I’m sorry for all of it
The deep bow brings us to the question of public apologies. If individual repair requires attentive nuance and holds the worrisome possibility of misunderstanding, what happens when we attempt to scale up—attempting to apologize for injuries spanning generations or affecting large numbers of people? Back in the 1990s, Richard Joyce declared that we were living in an “Age of Apologizing” wherein Pope John Paul II:
has led the way, apologizing for almost a hundred actions perpetrated (or permitted) by the Roman Catholic church throughout the centuries—from the Crusades and the Inquisition, to the treatment of Galileo and women (I understand numerous mea culpas will mark the millennium.) The Portuguese president has apologized for an episode in the fifteenth century, wherein thousands of Jewish refugees were forced to flee or convert (December, 1996). The American president has apologized to American victims of radiation tests (October, 1995), to victims of the “Tuskegee” medical experiments conducted between the 1930s and 1970s (May, 1997), and to African leaders for the whole slave trade (March, 1998). On December 11, 1997, the American Secretary of State apologized to African leaders for the international community’s failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda. And so the list could go on, taking in apologies in South Africa over apartheid, in Australia regarding deeds of colonial racism, and from the German government concerning certain episodes of World War Two.
When is something too vast or overwhelming or too long buried in the past to apologize for? Is this ever the case? Can an unrelated individual apologize for a group, a nation, the ‘international community’? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but it brings me back to the limitations of the verbal apology. History holds on—deeply, physically, spatially—and holds on for a long time…perhaps infinitely. In that case, the time limit on apologizing never runs out. If we are to “be slow to judge,” as Mrs. Curren reminds us in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, then we must also be slow to understand and to resolve. Yet, at the same time, words do run out, do have a time limit, do lose their effectiveness after years, decades, centuries of weight. Perhaps, then, it becomes more appropriate to apologize without words—in doing so, we do not become stuck in the perilous maze of language but can express broader connectivity. Words are destined to lose their structure, especially under the weight of time. Indeed, they are also too light and fleeting to hold our heaviest burdens. And that may be where space can step in where language fails. One of my favorite examples of spatial apology was Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995.
Without words, or rather by using the language of space and time, Christo transformed an egregious wrong into the sublime into a collective moment of silence. The wrapping of the Reichstag spent time within a moment, shared collectively, thereby presenting the community, the nation, the world with a chance for a new sort of beginning—unfolding in the physical space that we embody. I’m sorry became an architecture itself, in this case hugging the original sin in recognition and opening. The apology became a new layer over the many layers of history embedded in the building. Five million people ended up visiting the installation over the weeks that it was up. When have you ever known the words I’m sorry to have the capacity to achieve what this gentle fabric did? To draw so many people in, to hold space deeply and for such a length of time, to “envelope and then release history” (in Christo’s words), to embed in memory for generations?
Art, in this manner, can perhaps serve a critical role…a role more significant than its sometimes more aesthetic purpose or abstract questions. As Suszi Gablik describes it, art can enable us to share participation—and burden—spatially and socially, thus transforming us through the encounter. In this sort of third space, you can “close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards.” (Casper David Friedrich) Offering what we find in the darkness may indeed be our salvation.
The funny thing is I’m sorry may just be enough as it is—those seven letters offered and then allowed to hover in the air, not loaded with explanation or blame or further excuses. However, I am not sure that considering the failures of that small but mighty phrase means much in an age that seems intent on never saying it at all. Our problem used to be that we acknowledged but didn’t take accountability. Now, we seem merely to dig in. There are no mistakes anymore. No regrets. No harm. We don’t ever need to say I’m sorry.
This fear of appearing weak seems to have pressed upon us, from the outside in, flattening us into a tight space wherein we don’t even seem capable of saying I’m sorry to ourselves. Or perhaps it all began there—inside ourselves where our trust in a world that feels unwieldy, that feels unrelenting, that feels destined to break us faltered. Where public apologies dried out and became a mere tool for advancement. And then new tools emerged which, frankly, were better for the job. Benjamin Franklin once memorably said: “Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.” It seems the reverse is true too, truer for our moment perhaps—whatever begins in shame, ends in anger. If only we knew how much we were all lying to ourselves about our worthiness. Then we would be sorry indeed.