Hedy Bloem
The word leaves your mouth before you have decided anything. Somebody else stops in front of you and you are the one who says it.
You know the versions. Sorry for asking a question. Sorry for taking up a moment. Sorry for being unwell. Sorry to the person who is late meeting you. Sorry for the state of a house that is perfectly tidy. Sorry, in an email, to someone who works for you.
Fight and flight are the two everybody knows. Freeze is the third. The fourth is fawn, and that is the one I recognised. Fight is the gear I go into in a crisis. Freeze and flight are what turn up in an uncomfortable conversation or an argument. Fawn was the everyday setting, running quietly underneath all of it.
What I had been doing, for as long as I could remember, was appeasing. Making myself smaller and more agreeable and easier to be around, so that the room would settle. And it worked. That is the part I had never let myself see. I was not weak at it. I was extremely good at it.
It worked so well that it stopped being something I did in a difficult moment and became the setting I lived at. It was how I met a stranger, a colleague, a shop assistant, and the people closest to me.
The apologies were never really the problem. They were the visible edge of something that cost me a great deal more.
Underneath every sorry was a scan I never switched off. Is that face annoyed. Did that land badly. Should I soften it. Then the softening, the extra sentence, the smile, the offer to help. All of it was work, and none of it appeared on any list, so nobody counted it, including me. It is a large part of why the tiredness never made sense on paper.
It did not hold because my apology was not coming from my opinions. Understanding my pattern happened on the top floor of the house. The apology was fired from the basement, from the part of me that was watching the room and deciding, in a fraction of a second, that this needed smoothing. By the time the top floor had an opinion, the word was already out.
So the work, for me, was never arguing with the word. It was giving the basement fewer reasons to think the room was dangerous. That was slower and considerably less satisfying, and it was the part that actually changed things.
If you recognised yourself in the first lines of this page, you already know most of what it is telling you. The useful next thing is not more information. It is seeing the whole pattern laid out plainly, once, in words that do not make you feel like a case study.
The Over-Giver’s Check-In does that. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and reflexive apologising is one of the twenty signs in it. There is no course attached and nothing to keep up with.
You are not too sensitive and you are not weak. You are extremely good at something that kept you safe once, and it is still running.
Everything on here is based on my own experiences, and the tools that helped me find my way. Take what serves you, and leave the rest. It’s lived experience, never advice, and never a judgement on your life or your relationships. I have not lived your life, and I am not here to pull anything apart. Wherever you are on your road, you’re the one who knows it best, and support is always there whenever you want it.
I am sharing my story, experiences and tools in the hopes that it will help women elsewhere in the world.