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Once upon a time, I had to email an ex when moving out of our once-shared house. They’d left shit-tons of stuff behind when they moved out a year prior, and I wasn’t sure what the hell to do with it. At some point in this correspondence, I found the present email chain on this topic by searching for their address in my gmail — which is when I saw the apology email they’d sent me months ago. (I’d re-routed all of their emails to my archives as part of my Trauma Therapy Healing Journey) It stunned me, it twisted me inside out, and my god, I was so grateful for it.
Throughout the relationship, I’d been made to feel crazy for thinking [x] was happening as they insisted to me that despite all signs to the contrary, [y] was happening. The apology email put so much of that to bed — I wasn’t wrong, or crazy. Everything I saw and felt from them and suspected was completely true. I appreciated it, deeply.
But I know a lot of people who feel differently, who say apologies are more about the apologizer than the recipient, that they’re really about saving face or absolving oneself of guilt, that you shouldn’t ensnare an old flame in a present inferno, that it’s best to leave well enough alone.
Maybe because I’m a writer and a person who spends a lot of time analyzing and trying to understand my past — why the people around me made the choices they did, why I behaved the way I did — I’m always hungry for more information from said people. Even if it’s self-serving on their behalf! It’s general social etiquette to apologize to someone for doing something wrong, but somehow if it’s an ex… it becomes not ok? That’s interesting to me.
There is one ex and someone I sort of casually dated who I think about apologizing to every now and then but can’t sort out in my head if it would be appropriate or helpful to them or not. I fear it being read as self-serving. The ex is definitely a “clean break” person with breakups (they removed every pic from social media, don’t stay friends with exes, etc), so I don’t know if anything I said to them would be welcome. I think a lot about amends within the context of AA and other recovery programs — the guideline that you shouldn’t reach out if it would harm them more than it would help them, but also I’m curious why the personal growth one does to recover from addiction warrants amends but other forms of personal growth don’t. That’s interesting to me!
On a tangential note, one thing about the ex-girlfriend interviews we used to do was that I do think there was a benefit to processing these things many years after, to better understand ourselves and each other, to make memories more whole or full. But not everybody shares that desire for retroactive introspection that I do. I also love to forgive people. I hate holding personal grudges. I love forgiveness, and a reason to. Gimme one reason to forgive you, and I’ll turn right back around.
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