The Apology

Someone owes you an apology you are never going to get. The sooner you believe that, the sooner you are free.

Maybe it is the one who rewrote the narrative with themselves as the wronged one. The friend who disappeared when it counted. The person who damaged something in you and walked away clean, convinced they did nothing. Doesn’t matter…

You are still waiting. Some part of you has been waiting for years.

Stop.

The apology is not coming. Not because you do not deserve it — you might. Because the person who owes it does not have the tools to give it. A person (including you) who cannot see what he did cannot apologize for it. You are waiting on a debt the other person does not even know is on the books.

Every day you spend waiting, you hand them control of your mental state. They wronged you once. Now you let them do it again, every morning, by keeping the wound open and waiting for a hand that will never come to close it.

So close it yourself.

Apologize to yourself on their behalf. Say the words they should have said. Not out loud, not to them — to yourself, in your own mind, where the wound actually lives. What happened to you was wrong. You did not deserve it. It should not have gone the way it did. You can give yourself the acknowledgment they refused to. It counts more than you would think.

Then move on. Not because the thing did not matter. Because you matter more than the apology does.

If you think closure is something another person hands you. It is not. Closure is something you build yourself, out of the materials you already have, when you finally stop waiting for delivery of something that was never going to ship.

Better to assume the apology will never come and act on it — than to assume it might, and spend your life doing nothing but waiting.

Let it go.

The apology was theirs to give. The peace is yours to take.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” — Marcus Aurelius