How to Stop Saying Sorry When Things Aren’t Your Fault

A month ago, my mother told me she wanted to move back to India before she got too old. It wasn’t the first time she’d raised the idea, but this time she seemed serious—like she was letting me know it will happen. My parents are the only family I have in Australia, apart from my partner. When pressed why, she said she and my father didn’t want to have no one around when they were in their old age. It was as if she was saying having me was not enough. I knew that it wasn’t my fault, I knew I was enough. I knew her feelings of loneliness were more about the remnants of a life of migration and distance than they were about me, or any way in which I’d failed to make her feel. But I looked at her and said I was sorry.

I have been trying to let go of saying sorry. I apologize to my parents, to my partner, to friends, to colleagues, and even to strangers. Most of the time, it’s for things I cannot control, let alone be responsible for. From my manic searching on the internet, the habit of constantly saying sorry is not a trait of any diagnosable condition, nor a sign of any obvious sociopathic tendencies. But it is, from my personal experience, a problem.

My partner was diagnosed with a chronic illness two years ago. He has an autoimmune disease which has meant countless visits to the hospital, dragging periods of pain and discomfort, and a big shift in the way we live. He’s had to adapt to pain, discomfort, and a changing body—daily reminders of an illness that may never get better. And I’ve had to adjust to my changing and uncertain role: to be partner and carer, to be lover and also comforter, all the while seeing someone I love so dearly suffer.

The doctors say there’s no cause for his illness. It’s just something that happened to him, through nothing he did and nothing he could have avoided. Yet, as each day passed, I couldn’t help but say sorry to him. I apologized for when he felt unbearable pain. For his fatigue that meant days had to be spent in bed, and plans had to be canceled. When his friends stopped asking how he was, because the answer was always going to be a variation of not great, I said sorry to him. And when I was tired of carrying the weight of being the only one that was always there, I said sorry.

A while back, when I was in the middle of saying sorry for another day he spent in pain, he stopped me. “You know this is not your fault, don’t you?”

I replied instantly, “Of course, it’s just you’re—”

He interrupted me, “I worry that when you try to make it easier for me by saying sorry, you’re making it your fault that things are like this.”

I dismissed the exchange at the time and quickly changed the topic. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that what he said was true. I had become so caught up in apologizing for how hard things were that I had begun to think of myself as responsible for his discomfort and mine.

*

My parents, older sister, and I migrated to Melbourne when I was six. One day, in our sun-filled flat in Mumbai, my parents sat us down and said, “We’re moving to Australia. It’ll be good for your sister and you. It’ll be a new start.”

I can’t remember us ever talking about what ‘good’ would be or what they meant by a ‘new start.’ I liked my life in Mumbai. I had my family, my friends, and by a six-year-old’s measure everything was ‘good.’ There are memories I have of Mumbai, of my father’s late work nights, spending weekends away or at functions, and of my mother as the one who was around. I remember overheard conversations between my parents, of wanting better for themselves, their life, and their children.

I can’t remember being privy to much more than that. All I understood about why we packed up our lives into four suitcases, and caught a flight across the world for a ‘new start,’ was my parents’ belief that it would be good for me and my sister. While I can’t recall my parents ever pointing the figurative finger at me, I felt the heavy weight of their decision to migrate.

It was the mid-1990s, on an unseasonably cold day in November, that we arrived in Melbourne on a public holiday called Melbourne Cup. The streets were dead and every shop we could see was closed. Our bright-eyed, brown faces tried to mask the growing feeling that maybe we had made a mistake.

Without any other family in our new city, the four of us clung to each other as we adjusted to our new lives. My parents tried hard each day to exude optimism. The supermarkets didn’t stock any of the food my mother had used to make us our daily meals in Mumbai. Yet in the absence of bhindi (okra), karela (bitter melon), and tindora (baby gourd), she fried French green beans and frozen peas with turmeric and chili powder, spices we’d carried with us in our suitcases to savor the taste of home. My father’s high-ranking job in a government department in Mumbai didn’t translate to the jobs in the newspaper classifieds, so my father turned to his previously forgotten social work degree, determined to find work, to make things work. My parents were trying to create a sense of home for my sister and me, masking the fact they were worried about this decision they’d made for them and for us.

I had no language to explain to my parents I knew how they felt, how I wished they didn’t feel this way. I had no way of showing them I too was scared of the non-Indian faces at school who ignored me when picking teammates in their schoolyard games. Of the school teacher who made prejudiced assumptions of my English ability and mispronounced my name to the extent that it became something I didn’t recognise as mine. I had no way of telling my parents, without compounding their own pain, I could see beyond their enthusiasm to know they shared the same discomfort I felt.

So I did what I thought was right: I said sorry. I’d say sorry when we had to walk too far to carry our groceries home, even though it wasn’t my fault we couldn’t yet afford a car. I’d say sorry for the bad days at work where they were forced to repeat their perfect English in Australian twangs so their colleagues could grant them some level of acceptance. I’d say sorry when they couldn’t resolve arguments they had because my mother felt they were repeating old patterns in a new country, where she was the one looking after the children as my father threw himself into his job. I’d also say sorry at school. I’d apologize to my teacher when I already knew the answers to the basic mathematical lessons he taught since I covered the same lessons in India. I’d say sorry to classmates because I couldn’t yet understand the slang they uncompromisingly spoke to me.

When I look back at these instances in my childhood, I regret all the times I said sorry when it was not what I meant at all. I said sorry to fill in silences caused by feelings I could not convey to my parents. I said sorry because I felt the weight of their decision to leave our home, even though it wasn’t my decision at all. And I said sorry as a way to mask my own feelings of shame for having to assimilate in a society that only saw me as different. As a child, unable to name and parse the complex traumas of diasporic life, I found meaning in apologizing. But in doing so, I lost the language to express my own discomfort and to give myself space to grieve.

I found meaning in apologizing. But in doing so, I lost the language to express my own discomfort and to give myself space to grieve. 

While immigrating and caring for a loved one who has a chronic illness seem like two entirely different things, they both are processes in which I lost control and had to adapt to traumatic change. Unknowingly, I had carried apologizing, the crutch I had used as a child to survive migration, into adulthood. It was the crutch I was leaning on as I cared for my partner, rather than confronting my own sorrow.

*

“What’s the word for sorry in Hindi?” my partner asked me recently.

He started learning Hindi about five years ago. While there were gaps in his vocabulary built on some classes, apps, and very rudimentary ‘lessons’ from me, ‘sorry’ seemed like an essential phrase he surely could not have missed.

“It’s mujhe maaf keejiye,” I replied to him, expecting him to respond with familiarity.

“That’s ‘please forgive me’ though,” he said. “What if you’re just saying sorry?”

I stumbled back a reply. “I don’t think there is a word for just ‘sorry.’ It’s always about seeking forgiveness.”

In Western culture, we’re taught at an early age that the key tenets of good behavior fall somewhere between saying thank you and sorry. Say thank you when people do something nice for you. Say sorry when you’ve done something wrong, or when you’ve made a mistake, or when you might just have misunderstood. Sorry was a cover-all. It’s an accessible word to use when you can’t always express what it is you’re feeling beyond some amount of regret or sorrow.

The same has never been true for apologizing within my Indian family and community. Sorry is not a phrase to cover the full ambit of situations that fill you with awkwardness, casual missteps, or pain felt by others. In its Hindi evocation, apologizing is a deliberate and conscious act accompanied by some form of personal reckoning.

When I left India, I was relatively fluent in Hindi. Though I never had the chance to properly learn it in a classroom, I have held it tightly. I feared that letting go of my ever-shrinking recollection of phrases would somehow mean letting go of my heritage and how I understood the world. Now, the few occasions I get to speak in Hindi fall into the transactional interactions I have with my parents, my partner, and the Uncle at the grocery store from whom I buy my aged basmati rice and imported frozen bhindi. I don’t use Hindi to express my feelings, and so I hadn’t used it to say I was sorry.

*

I have been trying to stop apologizing for things that are not my fault. When I think of all the situations when I would say ‘sorry’ in English, to say mujhe maaf keejiye instead doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it forces me to ask for forgiveness—something I cannot ask for or be given if I am not responsible for the hurt.

Thinking of apologizing in my home language has allowed me to understand the act of apologizing as inherently connected to asking for forgiveness. It reminds me that I do not need to blame myself for others’ pain. I can empathize with it without the need to offer language to take personal responsibility.

By thinking of saying sorry in Hindi first, I pause my compulsion to say sorry and instead concentrate on what I could offer. I could offer love to my partner in his struggle with his illness. I could provide empathy to my parents for their ongoing difficulties caused by a life of migration and being part of a diaspora. And perhaps I could offer myself acceptance by refusing to apologize for myself in a Western world, by letting go of saying sorry for who I was and who I am.

In the spaces I occupy now, I think of how I can survive not by apologizing, but by using language as a way to articulate these feelings a younger version of me wasn’t able to. I let go of saying sorry as a way of accepting what I can do and who I can be, and apologizing only in those moments when I truly seek forgiveness. Being myself is not one of them.

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