Freaking Out & Making Amends

Being mostly alone in a new city gives me a lot of time to think about things. I do a lot of thinking normally but having so much alone time has caused me to reach new levels of over-thinking and over-analyzing. One interesting thing that this has caused me to want to do is "make amends" with everyone I have ever "wronged."

I put the word "wronged" in quotation marks because as an empath, I am overly sensitive to every single thing I ever say or do to anyone so oftentimes, my definition of wronging someone is a regular person's idea of normal interaction. For example, I sent someone a page long, barely lucid email at 6AM apologizing for losing touch when we were 14. I had been wracked with guilt for over 12 years and his response, in summary, was, "Oh, I thought it was my fault. No harm done." I have a lot of nightmares about friendships I feel I had caused to end and bad things I'm convinced I'd done and for some reason, I have a hard time letting them go, no matter how old or ridiculous they probably are.

Of course, in apologizing, I spend the whole day freaking out as I wait for a response. I have gotten people admitting that they were angry with me, which is hard, but it comes with the territory and I absolutely deserve it if I did something wrong. I can only hope that those people can forgive my wrongdoings because I am truly sorry. However, 99.9% of the time, the response is "I didn't even notice." This causes me to wonder if maybe I need to be more okay with the fact that not everyone is scrutinizing my behavior all the time and that I really need to calibrate how necessary some of these apologies are.

In the meantime, be on the lookout for a page long email at 4AM about how sorry I am regarding that one time I canceled getting coffee with you because I had the swine flu three years ago.

Sophie, a cat who I owe many apologies to for tap dancing poorly while holding her.