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Apologizing for a very old wrong?
Posts
"Okay, so one guy who was practically in my boat to begin with is sorry for that one time.
I dont give a shit about that, I didnt want to remember any of it. Thanks, asshole"
Hell I'm sure he knows you didn't really mean it. He'd have done the same thing in your shoes.
Leave it be.
Holy shit. I don't mean to call you out, but you sound like a terrible fucking person.
And you sound like someone with repressed issues. Take it to PM's if you care. Our points of view are not the topic at hand.
I don't understand this at all.
You demand to know what reason there is for the OP to leave the guy alone, so somebody offers one: "Hey, I was bullied, and I've moved on. It would really upset me if somebody brought back all of those bad memories out of the blue for no good reason."
And you call him a "terrible fucking person" for that.
I mean, what the hell.
About 6 years ago, I was in a cafe, when I saw M walking towards me. She asked if she could sit at my table (I was on my own, having escaped from work for a short break), and said yes. She then told me she was so glad to have seen me, as it meant she could apologise for her behaviour on holiday, that she had felt very bad about it ever since, but had been scared to contact me. She's seen me and decided to bite the bullet. She said she was very sorry for her behaviour, I told her I forgave her. She then left, as did I. While I don't want to see her again, and haven't since, I am glad she apologised, and even more glad I forgave her. I had been carrying round resentment in the very back of my mind for years, I don't any more, and that feels good.
On the other hand, I upset and lost a friend (I still don't know how), I asked her about it, she insisted there was nothing wrong, but never contacted me. This was 3 years ago. I think it was because we didn't invite her for Christmas (we had the previous year, she was on her own) as we almost went down to London for Christmas, cos our daughter was at Uni there. I have tried talking to her, we invited her to our 25th anniversary re-wedding - she didn't reply until the week before, and then came for the service, but left immediately, we didn't see her. I wrote to her to say I didn't know what I'd done wrong, but that if I had hurt her, I was sorry. If she still wanted me as a friend, would she please contact me, otherwise I would assume she didn't want me as a friend any more. She never did. I still am not sure what I did to hurt her, but I said I'd not contact her again, so I haven't. She was Lewie's favourite of all my friends. I'm sad to have lost her as a friend, but I know I did all I could to sort it out.
The boy you hurt may remember, he may not. I was bullied at secondary school til I beat one of my bullies up - they left me alone afterwards. I wasn't proud of having hurt her, but I was glad the bullying stopped. I still remember her name and what she looked like.
Sometimes we can't fix things, and just have to let them go. Everyone does stuff at some point in their lives that they're not proud of, I think you should let this one go, and forgive yourself for what you did, you were a child, not a man. I forgive you.
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"The power of the weirdness compels me."
The fact that he wants to try to make amends is an admirable thing, and a lot of people seem really invested in convincing him it's not.
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Butters?!? Do you see what's in my H/A? It's OPINIONS! YOU'RE GROUNDED!
Exactly.
Just do it.
Seriously. I don't think I'm projecting some sort of repressed guilt by telling someone in their late twenties they shouldn't feel bad about something they did on the playground in the sixth grade, and especially about saying they shouldn't look this person up to apologise for said transgression two decades after the fact. Honestly, if somebody who I hadn't seen since 1991 looked me up and apologised to me for something they did in kindergarten I would be kind of weirded out.
Seconded. I would be completely and totally weirded out. I'd also wonder if something is really wrong with them to not only remember it but to call me up over a decade later to talk about it.
Honestly if the kid that sexually harassed me in 8th grade sent me an email apologizing I'd send him one back letting him know he's a fucking dick and that I never want to hear from him again and that he could shove his apology up his ass because a decade later it means nothing. I would then ream out whoever gave said kid my email address as if I'd ever want to hear from anyone who picked on me, apology or no apology.
[pedantry]In order for it to be a zero-sum event, his gains would have to equal the other party's losses.[/pedantry]
The people against it are being painted as anti-social, cowardly monsters who project their own feelings onto the situation. No one is saying it is contemptible to want to apologize and no one is saying there is no possible benefit but, there are definitely situations where you should not. Potentially causing more harm to alleviate your own pain is definitely one of them. To people saying it can't possibly cause more harm: If no one carried the baggage of their youth, there would be far fewer mental health practitioners in the world. No one can say how badly damaged this person was from bullying. No one even knows the full extent or length of whatever events happened to him. Even if that one apology makes him feel slightly better, it isn't going to wipe away the rest of it, and it is surely going to bring up bad memories.
How does an apology that is 10 years too late mean anything? How would that make anyone feel better. After a certain point it just feels trite and more like you care about making yourself feel better about being a bully than making the kid you bullied feel better.
edit: read that wrong. I'm on the same side, but for different reasons. I don't feel it is right to apologize to make yourself feel better. You do it to make the other person better and with the time past and the type of event, there is no benefit.
edit2: first edit was too slow
Ah for some reason I read it the other way. I'm apparently just missing the part of my brain that helps with reading comprehension.
This just really bothers me because I had to put up with a lot shit for 5 years in school and if any of those assholes called me now I'd flip my shit. Hell, one girl in particular if she called me I'd fly home to NJ, beat her up and fly back home. There are some things you never forgive and some people you never want to see or hear from again.
Only two people in the "you should totally apologize!" camp have said that they have personal experience with being bullied, and that they would appreciate being apologized to. The first one just said it would be nice if it happened; in LadyM's case, she was bullied in grade school, and the person apologized in high school. I absolutely agree, in that case, an apology would be both appropriate and appreciated: only a few years would have gone by, and presumably the two concerned parties would have continued to see and interact with each other at least on some level, even if it was just being in the same school.
On the other hand, quite a few of us "for the love of God don't do it" people have talked about their own experiences with being bullied, and they have spoken out very strongly about how uncomfortable and unwelcome an apology from one of their childhood tormentors would be at this point. Meghan wasn't the only girl who bullied me at school, I got sneered and laughed and spit at all through high school, and I'll add my voice to VoC's: if one of those fuckers emailed me and said "Hey, I was a dick, my bad, sorry," I would be furious. I'm not an awkward gangly 13 year old with an afro anymore, but as soon as I heard from him again, that's what I'd feel like, and I don't particularly want to remember that part of my life. I've moved on.
Saying "it's never too late to apologize" is like saying "the best thing to do is always to tell the absolute truth." Maybe in a perfect world, that would be true. But in this one, it isn't. Some truths - and some apologies - do nothing more than relieve the conscience of the wrong-doer at the expense of the original victim.
At the very least, VT, the range of responses here should give you an idea of the range of responses you might expect if you go through with this. It's possible that the guy will just smile faintly and shrug and say "Aww shucks, don't worry about it, it's cool." It's also possible that he'll be hurt, or offended, or angered. Apologizing to him won't undo what you did, and it won't magically erase it from your memory - even if he says he forgives you, you'll still think about it from time to time, and you'll still feel bad for doing it. And if his response is negative, you'll also have the added burden of knowing that you made things worse.
18 years is a long fucking time, people. Yes, it's a good principle to apologize to people you've wronged in the past, but at a certain point it becomes a bad idea. There are quite a few people here saying that it's a bad idea, most of whom are drawing on personal experience with childhood trauma of various degrees. Telling us that we're despicable wretches of human beings for not advocating apology is small-minded and judgemental and not remotely helpful, so kindly knock it off.
This. I was flat out traumatized by what happened and I haven't spent the better part of a decade in therapy to get over what happened to have some douche bring it up just to make himself feel better. When I'm 30, hell, when I'm 50 I will still not want to ever see/hear from those people again. Luckily, I don't plan on going to the reunions and none of them ever got out of our crappy small-town so unless one of them is dumb enough to do something like the OP did I won't have to.
I do have some minor consolation in that what I did was nowhere near what was done to you Vision (thankfully... I can't even imagine that =( )... I was starting to feel like a really terrible person reading your post, but I think what happened to you was on a whole other level from what I did. But your point is still very valid (as well as everyone else's points about it being too late), and in the interest of not harming him anymore I'm going to stop pursuing the issue. I wanted to apologize to him many, many years ago, and I wish I had found a way to get a hold of him back then when it would've still been relevant.
I really appreciate all your guys' input on this. I just can't consider it to be zero sum if I feel better and he feels worse... if he feels worse, I'm going to feel a LOT worse. I can't use him as a means to my end of relieving guilt. I didn't think that's what it was at first, because I had this fantastic vision of asking for his forgiveness and him feeling relieved and happy that I did it... but after having slept on it, I don't think it would go down that way.
I DO, however, realize now that I hold onto guilt much longer than I should. I've been thinking about it a lot since last night, and I wrote a post about it just now on my little personal blog. This is what I wrote, and it's a bit long so like LPM did I'll spoiler it (thank you for your help as well LPM, you're a good friend and I value your opinion greatly):
Last night I was talking with some friends online, and the conversation turned to "bad things you've done to other people". My first thought was something I never forgot, something from a long time ago... that probably seems silly to have held onto from the outside, but it's always bothered me.
When I was in sixth grade, there were two people in my class (and, it felt, in my school) that were picked on incessantly. Myself (because I was "the fat kid"), and a kid named Chris Boyd (because he was "the nerd"). Ironically, I was a nerd too, but apparently children can only pick on one perceived human failing at a time. One day I was out on the playground, and a group of people were circled around Chris. As I got closer, I saw that someone had pushed him to the ground (that is to say, he was on the ground... I've always assumed someone pushed him, but I don't know for sure), and he was just kind of lying there. These two kids that always used to bully us pushed me to the front of the group of people, and started egging me on to sit on him. The crowd started chanting "do it! do it!". And instead of sticking up for my fellow man and doing what was right, I appeased the crowd - grateful to not be the target of it all for once - and sat on him. He got the wind knocked out of him, and I felt horrible... but when the school found out what happened, I took the cowardly way out again and said that I'd been pushed on top of him.
It's strange... it was a very long time ago, and I was very young, but I've never forgiven myself for it. After that happened, I never struck another human being again. By the time I was in 8th grade I had realized just how deeply wrong my betrayal was, but I had no way to contact him. And it's kind of... sat inside me ever since. I decided, back then, that I never wanted to hurt anyone again. And that decision has stuck inside of me for a long time.
But I did hurt more people.
I started thinking about it more, other people I'd hurt that I never gave up on. My first girlfriend, who was more patient with me than I deserved and who received nothing but drama and angst from me when she was just trying to be true to herself. Taking sides in a slowly boiling argument between two co-workers when I was an RA, and allowing the fight to boil over instead of helping to resolve it. The guy whose parking spot I stole because I drove through the wrong entrance to the parking lot without realizing it and then didn't see him two years ago. The car I almost hit a year and a half ago when I ran a red light because I wasn't paying attention. Heh, even the time that I tried to pull the beard off of some guy dressed like Santa Claus when I was 13.
Some of those were accidents, but some of those were deliberate acts of selfishness. Acts that I've never forgiven myself before, even though they happened... what? Almost ten years ago? Fifteen years ago?
I started hunting down the people who I've wronged that I knew the names of. Some were easy... and I sent messages to them apologizing for what I'd done. Chris Boyd, in particular, took longer. I'd lost track of him many years ago, and I ended up finding a defunct E-Mail address... and then, after another half an hour or so of searching, I found the E-Mail address of his father. I sent him an E-Mail, telling him that I was an old schoolmate of Chris' and that I was wondering how to get a hold of him.
But why am I doing this? I can only assume that most of these people got over it a long time ago. Hell, everyone may have forgotten about it entirely, and now all that I've succeeded in doing (rather than making amends and healing old wounds) was make for an extremely uncomfortable and awkward moment for them.
My wife, along with some of my friends, convinced me to stop this madness before it went on, that the chances of actually being helpful or doing good with all of this were negligible and that I was being irrational. And now that I've slept on it, I think I have been. I do feel sorry for what I've done to people - very much - but so much of it has passed so long ago that I'm not going to help anyone by apologizing. I think that I have some sort of underlying mental problem, though I don't know what "feeling an unusual amount of guilt" would be called. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I really do have some kind of problem, and a very serious one. If I bump into someone accidentally when we cross paths as I walk somewhere, I apologize profusely and proceed to think about it for several hours. If I cut someone off on the road I think about it for days. If someone seems to feel awkward when I'm talking to them, I can't stop thinking about if I'm doing or saying something that's causing them duress, and then I dwell on that for days. I can't quit my current job even though I don't have healthcare and I'm getting paid somewhere around 30,000 less per year than I deserve because if I leave it will cause the current people who work there harm... and every time I try to work up the courage to do so, I back down because I don't want to hurt them. It's been like this for years and years... as long as I can remember.
And all of this probably sounds insane, and even stupid, to anyone who's reading this. And I feel compelled to apologize to you about it even as I write this.
...what is wrong with me?
Anyways, long story short... I really do think I've got some kind of mental problem here. No one here's said it so I don't feel like anyone's convinced me of it. I think I'm just kind of... figuring this out. This has been a problem all of my life, and I need to work through it. I definitely do feel, now, that it's too late to apologize... for any of the stuff I mentioned above.
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I found out many years later - long after graduation, I guess - that this kid had a truly horrendous home life. Alcoholism, abuse, God knows what else, which eventually culminated in his dad committing suicide. I did the math and realised that about the time this was all going on was back whenever he was giving me shit every day. Looking back on it, the stuff he put me through was probably nothing compared to what he had to suffer when he went home at night. Another guy - who was usually cool with me but one day decided he was going to burn my hand with a cigarette lighter - had a father who went on to become a murderer. I would feel pretty weird if he hunted me up and apologised for that lighter burn today, and even weirder five or six years from now. It's in the past.
So, the guy has probably either forgotten about it or realised what was going on. Kids are cruel, and all of us were kids once. There's no need to beat yourself up over it, or reopen childhood wounds.
EDIT: Guess this post was a little late. Still, it's good that you recognise that this constant guilt is a problem. I don't really know what advice to give you on that front, but I'm sure some of the other people on here will.
Also I don't think it's healthy to be fixated on something from a decade ago in this manner. If apologizing is what's gonna let you move on, okay, well fine but I think you might stand more to gain by looking inwards at why this is still an issue for you.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
If any of the people that bullied me in school e-mailed me or stopped me to give an explanation and apology for being a dick to me, I really wouldn't care. I've moved on, I learned from those experiences. It wouldn't be a negative thing if they did. At the most all it would do would be to reinforce the fact that, 'yup, everyone grows up and regrets things they've done. This guy wants to make himself feel better.'
Don't do it, forgive yourself, and move on.
However since this event is so insignificant, you will just come off as a crazy person, and he will think "Shit, crazy people are contacting me"
I mean, if you run into him in a bar or something then you can mention it in passing, but initiating contact just for this is insane.
EDIT: Also, I should make it clear that I never actually had a laugh about it. I regretted it pretty much immediately after it happened, though my initial response to regretting it was to cover my ass with a lie instead of admitting it and apologizing to him, and I didn't realize until a year or so later (when I had no idea how to get in touch with him anymore) that the right thing to do would've been to apologize right there on the spot, or better yet to have not done it in the first place. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I definitely didn't get a laugh out of it for sure. I think what I got was a momentary reprieve from the feeling that I was the one being teased, which lasted until the moment I actually sat on him.
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