What hurts is that people treat it like I am doing this obsessive, unnecessary thing when in reality the amount I say sorry is perfectly tailored to the amount that I am randomly (random only from my perspective of course) pissing people off all the time around me with my actions. Which in practice means I say sorry all the fucking time.
Those same people that tell me not to say sorry I have pushed to the edge of their tolerance of me many times, and the ONLY thing I can do in those situations is say sorry in a genuine way. People really dont fucking understand having an intimate familiarity with those moments where someone is seriously pissed off at you and not only wants a practical explanation for why you fucked up but more importantly they need an emotional explanation that squares your apparent desire to be a good person/worker with the fact that you just massively fucked up something in a way that sure makes you look like a lazy, uncaring person. I have no agency in those moments, I am basically an 18 wheeler smashing through someone else’s life but I have no brakes and LITERALLY the only thing I can do in that moment to make the situation better is apologize simply but genuinely in a way that conveys how hurt I am by own actions too.
Of course, the ones that love me always return to their more patient selves and apologize for getting frustrated with me, but apologies mean nothing to the memory in my body of feeling like I am always sliding towards seriously aggravating someone and hurting my relationship with them. Further it is only a learned, constant input of willpower and constant attentiveness that keeps me from constantly blowing past people’s threshold of patience for me in moment to moment interaction and also in broader life contexts. An absolutely necessary survival strategy for me has been learning to constantly “manually breath” with my experience of reality so that I don’t slip back into autonomic behaviors that immediately cause friction with the environment and people around me.
Saying sorry a lot is my way of double checking my social awareness and making sure I am not missing the fact that now I am just yelling at everybody for no reason because I am excited about the conversation or something. When people react with “hey, stop saying sorry!” the consequences are they are mildly annoyed at being asked the question, but when it opens up a conversation about something I have been doing that is genuinely annoying people around me it can often be the ONLY thing that saves me and others from a lot of unnecessary suffering. It also, and I can’t stress the importance of this enough, is often the only thing that can halt someone from developing a narrative about who I am that is wildly inaccurate (I don’t care, I am lazy, I don’t like working).
The world is going to have to become a hell of a lot more accommodating and accepting of ADHD before I stop saying “sorry!” all the time and it is frustrating that people get upset at me for using a perfectly rational coping strategy in a society extremely hostile to my disability. Its like, people don’t want to see the amount of effort I have to put into not being a burden on others because it stresses them out and feels like a broken record… and sometimes I just get so angry and sad feeling like… yes that is exactly what it is like to be in my head 24/7, I am sorry you had to briefly experience that?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, but this seems like you actually understand why people get tired of constant apologies and are a bit tired of them yourself.
The unfortunate truth is that without meaningful change, apologies are just like excuses in that you’re trying to tell someone else that they shouldn’t feel a certain way about things you do or don’t. Which then just becomes another thing that can bug them.
Ranting about it won’t change it. If you see a pattern common with any new person you meet, that means you’re rubbing up against something ingrained in the culture, if not humanity itself. You can spend time and emotional energy wishing it was different, or you can accept that it is the way it is and work on trying to stop apologizing as a reflex because the fact you made this post means you already see that it eventually does more harm than good. That doesn’t mean you should never apologize, but try to do it as a conscious action rather than blurting out a “sorry!” any time you don’t feel perfect.
I mean, I don’t see apologies this way. I see apologies as an attempt to display some amount of caring that is not immediately apparent in your past actions. People aren’t robots, they don’t just care about whether you technically fulfill your tasks like a machine or not and no further. People are emotional beings, with mental models of other emotional beings around them that they use to inform their judgements and actions. I know it is easy to be reductive or cynical, but people really just don’t care only about whether you get the job done or not. I would likely not be alive if this were the case, as countless times in my life people with power over me have decided to extend empathy to me because they decided that even though my actions were not acceptable, my intentions and genuine desire to be a good person was evident.
Of course, but I think it is fair for me to point out how when I do blurt out “sorry” that there is a very rational reason for it. It is my way of impulsively testing for a mine ahead, and once you step on enough mines the words “oh you’re fine this field doesn’t have mines in it!” just start to lose all meaning.
What I am saying is that the tiredness people feel that manifests as annoyance at me apologizing all the time is actually the same tiredness I feel at constantly causing situations where I need to apologize and it really hurts when people simultaneously demand I make them stop feeling an emotion while simultaneously demanding I stop feeling an emotion (and taking rational steps to reduce the likelihood of events happening that create that emotion in me). In other words, when I annoy someone from saying sorry too much, no matter what they believe from their perspective, I know without a shadow of a doubt that this mild annoyance is a small cost to pay for occasionally heading off major conflicts and proactively defusing rising tensions I wouldn’t have perceived until they were much bigger problems. This doesn’t just go for my mental well being, I KNOW it applies to the mental well being of others around me because I have seen the consequences of not saying sorry proactively and while they are less common they can be catastrophic in a way that makes all those small annoyance costs trivial.
The point of my post was I wanted to express this in a space where people might actually understand, not to rant about it as if that would change it, and honestly I am a bit frustrated that you would project that on to my posts. I think I have put a lot of care and time into purposefully not doing that.