"Oh, I'm sorry!" I exclaimed.
As I moved the salad leaves to one side to insert the cheese and olives, I realised what I had just done.
I APOLOGISED....TO A SANDWICH.
I mean, how do you explain that? It's not like I was making the sandwich for someone else. I was alone in my house. Did I think I would offend the sandwich, by placing ingredients in a slightly different order?
Perhaps in this case it can be credited to tiredness, but still - it's a peculiarity of mine, this tendency to over-apologise in any given situation.
When people come to visit: "Sorry, the place is a mess!"
When giving people a lift: "Sorry, the car is small!"
When visiting the doctor: "Sorry about being sick!"
I think I've inherited it from my mother, but in the same way Isambard Kingdom Brunel exceeded the engineering achievements of his father Marc, I have far outstripped her efforts. You could say I have built the Great Eastern of apologetic habits.
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| "I'm sorry, rowers! And I'm sorry, North Atlantic ocean!" |
People often become irritated with me over this habit, particularly when I end up apologising for something that I had no ability to control, predict or have any kind of impact upon.
The takeaway joint was closed: "I'm sorry we couldn't get sushi!"
An excursion is interrupted: "I'm sorry about the rain!"
Someone falls over: "I'm sorry for the Earth's gravitational pull!"
Perhaps it's a measure of my general insecurity. It's no real secret that I tend to beat myself up over many things. I've also developed a great paranoia about appearing "up myself". That any overt display of confidence in my own abilities will be interpreted as arrogance and roundly condemned. My own whipper-snipper brain slashes at the poppies before they even have a chance to grow tall.
It's not something I really know how to change. It just slips out before I even realise. Somehow I've come to expect everything to be my fault at least in some way that it's just easier to issue a blanket apology covering my general existence and inconvenient impact on the lives of others.
Of course, the biggest downside is that apologising for all the tiny, relatively unimportant matters takes away a lot of power from the "sorry" when it is required for use for larger, relatively important matters.
There's really only one person I should be apologising to, for putting them through such unnecessary flaggellation. And that - unsurprisingly at this point in the blogging narrative - is me.
Now I just have to work on my "forgiving" skills....
