Why you're sorry for being sorry
On the exhaustion of inhabiting "a relational posture of explanation"
Over a decade ago, when I used to send newsletters out on MailChimp, I would first send them to a friend to proof who would always strike through the first sentence or two and say something like, Stop opening these with an apology.
Hers never had them. She could go months without doing something and then just show up without an explanation, as if she didn’t have to purchase her way back; like she belonged there without earning. I knew what she’d strike through before I even sent it. It wasn’t so much that I was unaware of my habit as that I didn’t quite get how one moved through life without explaining themselves all the time. How else would people understand them?
Last week, I sent out a newsletter that I tried not to make an apology but which somehow still was. A few days later, in a working session with my editor on the section of my book that is, among other things, about being sorry, we wondered how many times I had actually apologized in my newsletter archive.
So I downloaded my metadata from Substack and ran it through ChatGPT and asked it whether I apologized a lot. And ChatGPT said, Yes, bitch. Yes you did. A thousand fucking times.
Here’s a snapshot of the numbers:
