Why you're sorry for being sorry

On apology as architecture

May 17, 2026

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:

Interpretation: direct apology language appears 100 times across 53 posts, but the larger reader-management field is much bigger: 772 reception-management markers across 156 posts. The deeper finding is not that you used the word “sorry” constantly. The deeper finding is that the archive repeatedly stages a relational posture of explanation, debt, self-correction, reader-management, and promised future coherence. In other words: apology is not only a word pattern; it is an architecture.

Most notably (to me): the 772 occurrences of ”reader management and reception monitoring” in 145 posts out of 183.

Years ago, in the middle of teaching a yoga class for recovery in which we were doing a little sharing, a participant cross-talked me and said in front of the class something to the effect that it was obvious I didn’t have a lot of self-worth. At the time I was running my third or fourth sobriety school, hosting a beloved and popular recovery podcast, and was seen as somewhat of an expert in my field, or at least a burgeoning one. And it felt like the most exposing thing anyone could have said and like the one thing I could not let people see; like a real tell about me and something that risked my disqualification.

Last week after sending that post, I got about a dozen emails and texts from folks that specifically identified the apologetic nature of it and how they wished that I would stop explaining myself. And again I found myself burning with that same exact feeling I did in front of that class all those years ago, like I’d been found out for something I’m not supposed to be, and a potential disqualification, which only made me want to say, I’m sorry. For being sorry.

The thing is, I am not really all that sorry for being sorry. Exhausted, maybe. But not sorry. Not anymore. Even if I can’t yet escape a specific “literary architecture” that says differently; even if here in this archive, it’s still 772 instances deep.

Meggan Watterson recently wrote a post that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about on the deification of the patriarchy. In particular, she writes of how early pre-patriarchal Christianity was based in something called sophiology—or connection to the divine within, where salvation is aliveness, available to anyone, and mediated internally, through our own intelligence and knowing—and how patriarchal Christianity (the kind we know today, codified 300 years after Christ’s death by a group of power hungry dick-swingers) is based in what is called soteriology, where salvation is a future state beyond this realm, on offer only to a chosen few, mediated by an external authority, and based entirely on our behavior.

In the former goodness is inherent and the individual is the authority; in the latter goodness is always earned, easily lost, and everyone else is the authority.

On a call with Meggan a few days after I read it, asking about how it relates to some other material I’m working on, she said “I wouldn’t want a goodness that could be stripped from me.”

In other words, apology is what you do when goodness is revocable. And if being a writer (or at least the kind of writer I am) has taught me anything, it’s that in this arena, my goodness is revocable.

That I’m embarrassed when a reader writes me and says, Holly please be kinder to yourself. When a commenter says, We already knew about you what you’re just finding out. When I get a text from a well meaning friend saying, I wish you’d stop being so hard on yourself. When my editor says, Do you think you could disappear for three months and not write an explanation, and I say, No.

And my instinct is to regret; or apologize; or just feel bad about myself. To personalize it, locate it within myself as the source of what is wrong, and fix and fix and fix and fix until the spot is gone, until everyone or at least I can breathe because I’ve achieved a kind of state that doesn’t exhibit these silly tells of insecurity and desperation because by now, my God, I shouldn’t.

Instead I want these things to be reminders: That what we are trained to constantly interpret as a personal failing, as a thing we’ll have to fix, as something so wrong about us, as an embarrassment, a correction, and what they can see that we cannot like spinach in our fucking teeth: is actually part of a larger system meant to keep us there, thinking our work is to convince anyone and everyone but ourselves that we are okay or good or worthy, when the truth is that we already are.