I owe someone an apology from the autumn of 2004. I have written it perhaps a thousand times, in my head, in the shower, on the long drive to my mother’s, once in an actual letter I did not send and later burned in the garden because keeping it felt worse than the thing itself. The apology is now considerably larger than the event it is sorry for. I watch this exact problem in other people all day. I could not see it in myself for twenty years.
I coach people through transitions now, which is a tidy phrase for sitting with someone while the floor moves under them. Executives mostly, the ones who have arrived somewhere and found that arriving was not the thing. I am good at it, partly because I did it badly myself first, and partly because I can see the shape of what someone is carrying before they can, the way you notice a limp before the person mentions the knee.
What I see most is not guilt about the big obvious failures. People are oddly at peace with those. What trails them is the small stuff they never closed. A sentence said to a sister in a kitchen in 1998. A colleague they let take the blame and never corrected the record for. The person they stopped calling and could not afterwards explain why. These are tiny, and that is exactly why they do not decompose. A big wrong gets dealt with, apologised for, absorbed into the story of your life. A small one just follows at a polite distance, year after year, waiting to be looked at.
Mine, since you are owed it after all this. I was unkind to a junior colleague in London when I was twenty-nine and frightened and pretending not to be. Nothing dramatic. I carried an idea of hers into a meeting and did not say it was hers, and when she caught my eye afterwards I pretended not to understand the look. That is the whole of it. She has surely forgotten. She has a life I know nothing about. The apology is not really for her anymore, which is what took me so long to understand. She does not need it. I do.
A big wrong gets absorbed into the story of your life. A small one just follows at a polite distance.
I tell my clients that an apology you cannot deliver is still worth writing, as long as you are honest about who it is for. If the person is gone, or would be hurt more by the reopening than healed by it, the letter is not a bridge to them. It is a reckoning with yourself, and you can hold that reckoning without making it someone else’s job to absolve you. Most of the weight people carry is not the wrong. It is the hope that the other person will one day lift it off them. They will not. That is the hard news, and once you really take it in, the release.
I did finally write mine down properly this year, at my own desk at dawn with the house asleep. Then I did not burn it. I put it in a drawer. Not sent, not destroyed, only set down. That turned out to be the move I had been unable to make for two decades: not to be forgiven, not to be rid of it, only to stop rewriting it. The tail is still there. It has just stopped getting longer.