As I have noted multiple times in one of my non-SorryWatch outlets, I am obsessed with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which you should be watching if you are not.
This past week, the show tackled the phenomenon in which you desperately want to apologize to someone you know you’ve wronged, but you just cannot because THEY WRONGED YOU TOO. This kind of pridefulness means the two of you stay apart, yearning for each other, in a yearning that is best expressed in the form of an ’80s-esque music video complete with random white-clad gymnast.
Needs more billowing curtains, though.
The SorryWatch-key lyrics:
I really wanna tell you that I’m sorryAnd I really wanna tell you that I am the worstAnd I just wanna sayI miss you every dayAnd I will…But you go firstI mean this is almost entirely all my fault hereBut you gotta admit it’s just a tiny bit your fault tooThis is so all on me but still you kinda have to agreeThat sometimes you can be reallyPassive-aggressive!Self-involved!So go ahead and say you’re kind of sorrySo I can say “Oh no, no, please!” just like I rehearsedIf you open the doorI’ll apologize so much moreYes I will…But you go first.
Why is it hard so hard to apologize first? Well, as we’ve noted before, apologizing means taking ownership of your own bad conduct. Knowing that you’ve done wrong feels crappy. So we turn somersaults to convince ourselves that we’re not actually at fault. We crave extenuating circumstances, excuses, reasons that the other person is guiltier than we are. We often refuse, as both Rachel and Paula do in the show, to take the first step. As social psychologists Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson have said, “Most of us put an enormous amount of mental and physical energy into protecting ourselves and propping up our self-esteem when it sags under the realization that we have been foolish, gullible, mistaken, corrupted, or otherwise human.” Essentially, when it comes to apologizing, what this means is…you go first.
Thiiiiiiiiiis… is kind of every single conversation I’ve seen on Twitter wherein someone has wronged a person and everyone is gently trying to say, “Hey, that wasn’t cool,” and they come up with all of the reasons that they COULD have been wrong, but then waste the time that they could have used making restitution to pull back before that final step just to put in that pinch of, “but if you know me, you know I didn’t mean,” or “you shouldn’t have said it that way, you don’t have to be mean,” and all of those same little stupidity that’s propping up self-esteem and making it, once again, all about them. It’s funny – especially when you get billowy curtains, bad hair, and gymnasts – but sadly those don’t come with genteel racism on Twitter.
Maybe the random white-clad gymnast is there to represent the gymnastics we all go thru to convince ourselves we’re not wrong!
I like the way you think.