Ah, yes, these mysterious feelings. They pass over us like cloud fronts. Who knows where they come from? Who knows why you're crying and furious and trembling right now? It really is such a shame, that you feel the way you feel. I sure hope this feeling passes soon. Because MAN is it an inconvenience to me that you're upset. And baby, you know I think you're ugly when you glare at me.

The miracle of this apology is that it uses the word "I" a single time, but completely divorces it from the feelings in question. You are feeling something—who knows why? I am doing nothing but feeling sorry for you. You know, like a hero! It's a shame that you're so irrational, but isn't it nice that I'm such a generous, caring person?

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What I'm really sorry about is: you, making a mistake! Because the person who's really at fault here—and I say this kindly—is you, the person who decided to be mad at me, wrongly, due to your bad and faulty brain. If you were superior, like me, then you'd know that you shouldn't be upset with me! But that's okay, because I can apologize and correct you, much like I would train a stupid dog.

Sometimes, to be sure, people misinterpret what we say. Occasionally unreasonably! You're allowed to say that, sure. But don't pretend that that's an apology. Do not do this cowardly two-faced thing, where you want the points for apologizing but also would like the person you're apologizing to to understand you don't actually have to apologize at all. There's a difference between "I do not ever want to upset you," which suggests a possibility that you have, in fact, upset somebody, and may need to work on doing better so you can avoid being someone you'd rather not be, and "It is wrong of you to be upset by me," which suggests that your good intention matters more than their lived experience.
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Another one that puts your intention over their response. Most people don't mean to hit other people with their cars, New Jersey residents excluded. Yet we collectively agree that hitting someone with a car is more-or-less a bad thing, even if you only meant to text your friend a funny GIF while you were driving.

Here's the bigger question: do you know why you upset them? Not just in the vague Oh, I guess they didn't like that kind of way. Do you understand why they had the specific kind of response that they did? Do you understand why they are that level of upset at that particular thing you did? Because you sure are invested in your own interior world—so much that you think a story about your intentions will suffice. Do you understand their inner emotional states? It's only fair to care about both, bud. Right?
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Stop. Just fucking stop.

If you have upset someone, then that person is the single last person you should be dumping your emotional processing on. They are especially not the person you should force to be your therapist over the specific thing you upset them about. And that goes double when your end goal is clearly: "Now I understand myself way better, this was a healing moment, so you can heal your way out of being mad at me! In fact, you should be proud of me. You don't want to stunt my emotional growth, do you?"

If you suddenly realize that your childhood and/or neurodivergence means you do shitty things to people sometimes, you can leave it at: "I'm sorry. That was awful of me. I'm going to do some reflecting on why I thought that was okay, because I never want to make somebody feel that way." And then you go back to figuring out whether this person wants emotional support from you or would rather you fuck off for a while (and/or forever), and you do all that reflecting on your own time.
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This is a very specific kind of shitty apology: the kind you make when you think you've made a faux pas, but instead did something absolutely vile, and think that the issue is just that the other person is "tender" or whatever. This comes up most obviously in cases where misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or [insert your favorite flavor of bigotry here] is concerned, but it also happens in any case where someone seriously transgresses—in the "this will forever change how I look at you" sense—and doesn't fully understand how bad the thing they just did was.

For instance. Fellas: if you deal with your insecurities and loneliness and anxieties or what-have-you by calling a woman a "slut," you haven't just said a rude thing. You have revealed an outlook towards women, towards what you think they "owe" men, and towards the way your own entitlement overrides other people's rights to figure out how to love their own lives—and that outlook is not only dire, it rather limits how many women will ever want you as a friend, let alone trust you enough with anything remotely intimate and vulnerable. (I am using this example because it inspired this piece, and because I am too lazy to make things up.)

You have learned, perhaps, that a mere "I'm sorry I was rude" doesn't suffice. For some reason. It has dawned on you, perhaps, that you have done a wee bit more than just behave like a horse's ass. So you reach for empathy, and you land on: "Man, it sucks that your experiences mean this upsets you so much. I didn't realize. I'm sorry."

And you are sooooo fucking close to getting it, in the sense that, astrologically speaking, Neptune is kinda close to the Earth. Because the thing to apologize for here is not: "Some people experience a kind of shittiness that I, personally, do not." The thing to apologize for is that those people experience that shittiness because people like you assume that it's completely acceptable, even in polite company, to go off and do something obscenely cruel. What you're looking to apologize for is that you have, in fact, been obscenely cruel, and that you didn't even notice it was cruelty to begin with.

Unless you understand both parts of that—and if you do, you'll probably feel wretched enough about yourself that you'll find apologies spring much more readily to your lips—you need to take a pause. Because this is a case where apologizing for the wrong thing inadvertently repeats the originally shitty thing you did.

Look: society is an ongoing nightmare in which we all perpetually hurt one another, in an ongoing tornado of confusion and misery and ignorance. You are not an irredeemable piece of shit if you, in your apathy and ignorance, fuck up. On the contrary: you are a completely redeemable piece of shit. But it's gotta be you who makes the effort, friend.
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To be fair, this is slightly less shitty of an apology. It's so much less shitty that people who are used to shitty apologies might call this one acceptable! Because at some point, when enough people have shat in your mouth, you're thankful when they piss in your mouth instead.

This is, to be clear, not a great apology. The fact that it's the go-to apology for Abusers Having A Contrite Moment ought to clue you in that this ain't exactly it.

The template for a good apology, as I've seen it taught in a number of different circumstances, goes something like:

What's left out of that template? Anything that involves you, the person making the apology, beyond the part where you did something worth apologizing for. Because an apology is not about you. It is about the person that you hurt, and the thing that you did to hurt them. You do not matter, in this instance, and you are not going to get space to matter until you have done the work—and it is actual, genuine work—that allows you to come to some kind of closure about the incident.

"I'm sorry that I screwed up" is a story about you. And the thing is, most of the things we need to apologize for come about because we made something about us—and ignored them in the process. The purpose of an apology is to make space for someone you neglected. And the process of an apology is to try and see how you neglected them, and to do what it takes to make it clear to them that you're fixing that for them now.

You can cry about how sorry you are until you're blue in the face—but is that helping? At most, you're just guilting the other person into feeling sorry for you, perhaps to the point where they decide that their feelings matter less than yours do. Again: plenty of abusive shitheads love to cry like they're repenting before their lord and savior. They'll get down on both knees, they'll go on and on about how much they hate themselves, they'll swear that they're forever changed by just how sorry you make them feel. And they never notice, or hope you won't notice, that they're only thinking about themselves. All their emotions are self-directed. Which is why, when you hold firm to what they said and did, all those sobs abruptly turn into furious snarls.

Remember that first shitty apology? "I'm sorry that you feel that way?" The one where "I" was only expressing sorrow and "you" were the one choosing to be upset for whatever reason? A real apology is the opposite of that: you are reacting reasonably to what I did, and I am only here to do what ought to be done now that I've made you feel that way in the first place.

An apology shouldn't be a feeling. It should be an expression of intent.
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oh fuck off