I have been wondering: What is the true meaning of an apology?
In my experience, there is more than one type of apology. There is the kind where I accidentally bump into someone in, say, a grocery store. In that case, I am quick to apologize. What I mean is, “Hey, this was an accident. I meant you no harm.”
I imagine this kind of apology originating in the Stone Age as a way to avoid fights. “I friend, not enemy, even though I do bad thing.”
This is a different kind of apology than the kind that says \”I am sorry for not talking much, for being so shy.” Or mentally ill. Or an agnostic. The second kind of apology and the guilt that comes with it is associated with an condition that is not a fault, just a way of being that makes certain people uncomfortable.
An apology in those cases, whether it is expressed or not, is an internalization of blame for a state of being, and the apology reinforces stigma.
What is blame? Usually, blame is a response to a mistake. What is a mistake? A mistake is an error.
In general, people frown on them. Some employers make it clear that they expect to see zero mistakes from any of their employees.
In school or the workplace, an error like a misspelling is not generally considered just an accident or act of nature; it is almost always considered a product of “carelessness.”
Is that true? Not always. I have made plenty of careful mistakes in my life. Sometimes I care so much about not making mistakes that my anxiety clouds my thinking. In that state I am more prone to making the kinds of errors I am trying my best to avoid.
An example: A few days ago I discovered a typo in a tweet. The horror was unbearable. Plenty of tweets have typos, and many tweets are nonsensical. But I am a writer and the tweet was about writing. I had edited the tweet but changing some words means I have to change others for consistency.
Sometimes I miss changing some words that need to be changed, and that is what happened in this case. The old preposition did not work with the new sentence. As soon as I saw it, I became unraveled. I immediately deleted it even though it had already been “favorited” several times.
I frantically typed out my corrected version, but it turned out that being frantic and eager worked against me. 15 minutes later I discovered that I had made a bigger and even more glaring mistake. It was the kind of misspelling that from the outside would appear that a considerable effort was needed to misspell anything so badly.
Worse, someone had tweeted to me a snarky remark about it. When you have bipolar disorder, sometimes all it takes is a tiny event to thump a mood off a precipice and into sharp descent, and that is what happened at that moment. How could I make the same kind of mistake twice in a row?
A feeling of shame attached itself to the anxiety I already had. I actually had an impulse to grab a megaphone and apologize to the snarky commenter and the entire Twitter-verse for my transgression.
Once more I rewrote my tweet, this time looking over it several times to make sure I had it right. But even after changing it, I felt terribly embarrassed.
It was not a good morning for me. But it would not have been a bad morning if I had not cared.
When I fall into a grim mood over something ultimately trifling, my mind sometimes goes into overdrive as I try to reason myself into feeling better. I wondered if my impulse to apologize to my snarky critic had been rational.
My error had been a careful error, not a careless one. But careless errors and careful errors look exactly the same. In situations where a lot is at stake, any error can have damaging consequences, so both kinds of errors are equally castigated.
From a purely objective standpoint, both kinds are \”wrong.” Complicating everything, the word “wrong” has two meanings that are often conflated.
The word “wrong” means “in error” like adding two plus two and getting three. But “wrong” is also used to mean “immoral” in the sense that murder and stealing are wrong.
The two types of “wrong” are completely different, yet they are confusingly linked under a common term. If you accidentally add when you are supposed to subtract, that it called a “careless error,” a phrase that ascribes a moral cause to the accident, meaning that character is a factor and blame is called for.
The phrase assumes that the answer is wrong because the error-maker has misbehaved.
But no one ever talks about careful errors, which is why I feel obliged to mention them. Many of my teachers operated on the assumption that all mistakes could be avoided if students adequately applied themselves.
On a purely practical level, this pretense is understandable. Should teachers send their charges the message that some mistakes are acceptable and inevitable? That “mediocrity” or sloppiness is allowed?
But a belief adopted for practical reasons is not necessarily true. Some mistakes really are inevitable.
I do not mean to suggest that errors never occur because of apathy. I have certainly made plenty of errors due to carelessness.
At the same time, some errors cannot be avoided. While I have made plenty of careless errors, I believe I have made far more careful ones.
I can learn from careful errors in the same way I learn from careless ones. Sometimes I think, “I will try to be less careful next time. Or at least not so careful that anxiety takes over.” But when I look back at the original error, I cannot think of a way, knowing what I knew at the time, that I could have avoided it.
But would avoiding all errors be ideal? Suppose you could eradicate errors forever. Are mistakes always bad? I wonder how many mistakes had to be made, moral, accidental, or careless, for me to be born, assuming that all my ancestors were not unimpeachable models of perfection.
I also wonder: How many mistakes did nature have to make for me to get here? The answer: there had to be hundreds of thousands.
A mistake that nature makes is called a “mutation.” For sexual reproduction to occur at a cellular level, the \”letters\” of the genetic codes contributed by the parents have to be copied correctly in order to be transmitted to their offspring. But sometimes those letters are copied incorrectly and the information is changed.
Although mutations can be viewed as mistakes made by nature, humans are a product of many thousands of mutations that have occurred over billions of years, a phenomenon that slowly turns single-celled organisms into creatures with complex nervous systems who are able to fret over their Twitter mistakes.
Many mutations are harmful and disfiguring. Most mutations are not advantageous but a few are. Those few are essential to natural selection and contribute to species diversity.
Would it be a better world if nature had never made those mistakes? It might be an interesting world, but there would be no humans in it; in fact, there would be no one to be interested in that world, no matter how interesting it was.
I also wonder: How many important scientific discoveries arose from mistakes? And how much of what is learned in art, writing, or most any skill comes about through making mistakes and learning from them? Is trial and error dispensable? Can you have the trials without the errors?
Regardless, in the world we live in, mistakes are generally considered bad, and they usually call for an apology. But while I am on the topic of apologies, I want to return to my point that not all apologies are responses to mistakes.
Granted, apologies are not all bad. Especially in cases of cruelty or abuse, apologies are definitely warranted.
But I believe that apologies, or at least apologetic attitudes, are too often demanded for the wrong things, such as triggering social tension simply by being different.
These apologies are not fairly demanded and granting them is sometimes harmful on both social and personal levels.
For example, an apologetic attitude in cases such as being gay or being part of an unpopular ethnic minority, whether the \”apology\” is expressed or not, is to accept blame just for existing.
In grammar school, I felt apologetic for being shy. I had absorbed the belief that simply by being the way I was, I had done something wrong. Not just other kids but also teachers had made that message clear. As a result, I was constantly trying to change and constantly failing.
The feeling of guilt for not “overcoming my shyness” made me far more vulnerable to bullies than I would have been otherwise. It is harder defend yourself against enemies when you think they might be even partly in the right.
When you apologize for things that are not faults, the apology goes beyond personal shame. In my case, acceptance of blame reinforced the absurd idea that shyness is wrong, which is destructive to many kids who are only trying to live their lives. My guilt served to validate an irrational social standard that said “Stop being different. Be like us.”
Now I know that the fault belonged to the bullies and teachers, and not me. Had I known that in grammar school, it might have changed everything. Instead of being sorry, I would have been angry – not an ideal response but a far healthier one than internalizing blame.
So when is blame appropriate? Only in cases where a choice has been made to do something harmful. It makes no sense to blame a six year old – or anyone – for being shy.
I realize I have gone off on a bit of a tangent. So where am I going with all this?
In a nutshell: Some of what society views as being mistakes are not mistakes at all because they do not harm anyone or because they are not a choice.
Many mistakes are inevitable and they are not always bad, at least not all bad. In fact, they are sometimes indispensable to learning an art and transforming single-celled organisms into people over billions of years.
Moreover, it is ludicrous to assume that mistakes can always be avoided. Humans emerged from a nature that routinely makes mistakes. In fact, humans emerged because of the mistakes.
Is it any wonder, then, that as a product of nature, I make mistakes all the time?
After thinking all of this through, right after my devastating Twitter double- typo fiasco, I felt better and was pleased to realize that I had practically written my next blog post in my head.
Though I promised myself I would try to be a less careful tweeter in the future, some embarrassment still lingered. But after thorough consideration, I decided not to apologize to the snarky commenter about my spelling faux pas. I had an even better idea.
I un-followed him. And fixed some lunch.