At last I think my brain has found the point of the needle I’ve been aimlessly tossing Halfman’s way ever since I found out what a total penile implant he is: I want him to have learned a lesson. And I want to see that lesson acknowledged through a full admission and a sincere apology. Of course I know this will never happen – his opportunities were full of obfuscation, avoidance, crossed fingers and ‘woe is me’.
As I’ve learned, an apology is a transaction, not just the wrongdoer telling you how bad they feel. I don’t care how bad he feels – unless we’re talking him feeling worse and worse until he self combusts in a sulphur scented plume that spells out ‘I suck’ as it wafts into nothingness.
I only continue to want karma to bite his hairy ass (yes, ladies, it is rather hirsute) because I know I’ll never get the acknowledgement I need to allow me to forgive.
He made me disappear – he made me not count at all – he made me the one thing I told him I was not willing to be: a secret, at a time when I was just beginning to realize that I existed and mattered and counted for something.
And the worst thing was that he knew that and did it anyway.
And the worser part is that he’s never acknowledged it. Never said: I treated you like absolute shit and I’m sorry. Instead he let me tell him he treated me like shit and then he told me how bad he felt.
That’s the bit that’s stuck in my craw, that still makes me angry.
And, you know, if it ever happens – even 10 years from now or tomorrow – it would make all the difference to me.
And it’s the ‘to me’ part of that phrase that makes me know it will never happen. There’s nothing in it for him.
Tag Archives: apologies
Day 0305
I had a dream last night that you came to see me at my office.
You sat down. I was polite.
You started with an apology. I said ‘thank you’ and started to feel relieved — like 10000000 tonnes weight off my shoulders relieved.
And then you started trying to convince me that your lies had all been my fault. You went on and on, quietly and gently as is your way.
And my sleeping mind said: Enough. I don’t need to listen to this pathetic spiel.
Angry words that I said to myself most unangrily.
And then I turned my dream off. And you were gone.
Day 0268
What is ‘sorry’?
I had a chat today that clarified some things in my head.
I have always declared that Halfman never apologized to me about what he did to me, how he treated me as if I was a Nobody, a heaping pile of Nothing.
He did utter words that made it clear how bad he felt that he’d got himself into a situation where he hurt two Good Women.
But he never ever said ‘I’m sorry I lied to you.’ He said instead ‘I feel awful’.
I’ve wondered often over the past 10 months why that didn’t satisfy me.
It is obvious now, of course.
Today’s conversation was along the lines of: So often a person’s sorry just tells you how they’re feeling. It doesn’t offer anything. Which means you are not acknowledged. It also means there is no opportunity to forgive, because you’ve not been given anything. There is no transaction offered with ‘I feel so sorry’.
I didn’t like the word ‘transaction’ used in that context but once I got over that I understood what I was being told.
I found Halfman’s tears in the park and His Pain that he whimpered to me about totally unsatisfactory not so much because I’m a bitch but because I didn’t care how he felt when his duplicitous actions were revealed. This was about me. I needed acknowledgement of what he had done to me: to hear the words ‘I lied and used and deceived you heinously. And I am sorry for my actions.’
Give me credit, I had told him – well, ordered him – to write me an apology that included all the lameass shit he did to me. But he never did. That would have taken courage for him to see his behaviour in black and white. To use words like ‘callous’ and ‘cruel’ and ‘selfish’ to describe himself. But it would have helped both of us, I am sure.
I wrote one for him, of course. But I deleted it. It was totally unsatisfactory: I already know what he did to me.
The hurt that needs the apology is in the pain of knowing Halfman doesn’t acknowledge those things and will only ever see himself as the victim.
1000 days 