What the reflex costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and most of it is paid without your seeing it leave.

The read. Warm, junior, unsure, the one who'll take the blame. Built out of forty trades a day, none of them large, all of them in the same direction, over years, by everyone you work with.

The real sorry, devalued. Chapter 8. When you've done wrong, the word you reach for has been spent on doorways, and the people you've wronged hear the doorway in it.

The questions framed as intrusions. Every softener turns a request into a favour, and favours get declined, and you've concluded that people don't help you, when the truth is that you've been asking in a form that makes helping optional.

The self-esteem. The NHS says that avoiding challenges reinforces the underlying doubts and teaches the unhelpful rule that the only way to cope is by avoiding. The reflex sorry is a small avoidance, of a confrontation that wasn't going to happen, forty times a day, and each one confirms the doubt it was meant to protect you from. An earlier book in this series is about talking to yourself the way you'd talk to a friend, and the reflex sorry is that habit said aloud to other people.

The tiredness. Apologising is work. Scanning every interaction for the offence you might be about to commit, and getting the sorry in first, is a form of vigilance, and vigilance all day is exhausting in a way that doesn't have a name.

The relationships. People who love you have learned to manage your apologies. "It's not your fault" has become something they say several times a week, and it's a small tax, and they pay it, and they'd rather not.

The forty small decisions a day, made by a reflex and not by you, about how you'll present yourself to the people you work and live with. That's not a cost in the usual sense. It's a matter of who's in charge of your own manner, and for years it's been the doorway.

And the things you don't say, because they'd have to arrive apologising, and the apology would take the room's attention before the thing could. Ideas, objections, requests. A great deal of what you've had to say has been said, if at all, as "sorry, but", and "sorry, but" is a sentence people stop listening to at the comma.