English Composition 121

Sorry I Said Sorry

Nothing feels better than hitting the bed after a long day of school.  I threw my bag carelessly, my mother would come in a yell at me for it later, but it did not matter to me right now.  The school week was finally over and I could finally play video games sunset until sunrise again.  It had been a while since I was last able to play with my friends, but it wasn’t without good reason.  School had become overwhelming. It was to the point where I would go to school, come back, do homework, eat, sleep, and then repeat the cycle.  It was ridiculous. It’s over now, I failed aced my tests so it doesn’t matter anymore.  

I opened up my phone and sent a message to the group: Sorry I’ve been a ghost lately, classes are crazy.  I closed my phone’s screen and contemplated rolling over and going into a state of hibernation.  I really wanted to play League with the gang, though. The silence of my room almost lulled me to sleep.  Almost.  My phone literally exploded with messages and the familiar sound of a skype call killed my will to sleep.

I opened my phone and scrolled through the spam of messages sent in the time span of me almost drifting asleep.  Most of them were messages yelling at me for saying sorry and urging me to get into that call now. I stayed laying on my bed for a little.  They could wait a few more minutes. Plus, I would probably end up hearing the perturbed comments coming from the two oldest people of the group on my “misused sorry.”

I don’t know why they always yell at me for saying sorry.  It’s not angry-angry yelling. It’s more along the lines of I’m not angry at you but rather I’m yelling at you because I care kind of yelling.  I always figured sorry was a good thing to say until I met them.  It just comes out so naturally for me. Plus no one else has ever really yelled at me saying sorry before.  And of course, my first instinct after being yelled at for saying sorry is to good job, me say sorry.  All that does is make them yell more at me and make me turn red from embarrassment due to their chastisement, leading to me saying sorry more.  It’s a silly cycle that I get caught up into. I don’t know if it’s because they’re yelling at me that I’m saying sorry again and again, or if it’s just a habit that I’m saying it so much around them.  Maybe I’m just dumb.

It’s not my fault that I say it so much!! I don’t know what’s wrong with me and why I’m so easy to make apologize.  You could probably look at me and drop something and I’d end up apologizing for YOU dropping it. I honestly think it’s just my personality to say sorry.  As they always reference, Zombie Apocalypse, I would be dead because I would end up apologizing to a zombie before I shot its brains out, giving it the opportunity to chomp on my apologetic self.  It would be that death or I would die because I would be far too kind to other people, who, as everyone knows, are far more dangerous than the actual zombies.  The things they think about, I swear.  

Don’t ever apologize for choosing to focus on education over video games.  There goes the star message she always sends me when I apologize for disappearing on them because I focused on school.  I mean, she’s not wrong in a sense, but apologizing for ghosting them feels like the right thing to do every time. Plus my apologizing isn’t harming anyone, so I don’t truly understand why they get so worked up every time I do it.  She always responds saying education is far more important than video games. That my apologizing would mean that I believed that choosing education over video games was wrong and required an apology. That’s not how I intended my apology to be received at all.

I got up finally and opened up my laptop to join the skype call.  I made sure to plug in my headphones to make sure to contain the yelling and pure essence of wildness wouldn’t wake up or disturb my grandma.  I got my mouse ready and set up my gaming area on my bed. I was ready to play sunrise to sunset with the gang.  I gave myself a moment to think of what my first words should be when I finally join the call.  I’m totally gonna start out apologizing. Sorry that I joined so late!


Blog #3

Journal Entry of someone that will be involved (indirectly or directly) in my autoethnography

2 thoughts on “Sorry I Said Sorry

  1. Dhipinder Walia

    Thanks, Brendalis. Ideally, I wanted folks to pick a person other than themselves, but I see that your project really is about your relationship to apologizing, so it would be worthwhile to journal and get to know your reasons for apologizing. I’d suggest pushing on your research through people by looking up history’s greatest apologizers and seeing if there’s a connection between who they are, how they were raised, etc. and you. I think of Lena Dunham. In fact, there’s a twitter account dedicated to all of the things she’s apologized for. From this post, I see more important than the reasons you apologize are the feelings you have when you’re scolded for apologizing. It seems like you’re self conscious about the way your apologies will be received, but it also seems like your apologies don’t change your behavior. You don’t make it a point to STOP being late to gaming, so then, why apologize? Isn’t the point of an apology to suggest you’ll change and not doing the action again? Is apology in this journal entry your way of dealing with an insecurity, perhaps of feeling like your friends are judging you? or that your friends won’t be as invested in a friendship if you don’t apologize? I wonder…

    DW

    see hypothesis for more comments.

  2. Brendalis Martinez Post author

    Thanks for the feedback!

    I find it funny that you believed that this journal entry was from my point of view! It’s actually supposed to be my online friend. We’re actually so similar that you would confuse us for each other if we didn’t have usernames. The cross-outs are just supposed to be cross-outs. Whenever I write journals, I always make mistakes and end up crossing things out. I figured it’d be nice to include in this exercise.

    I’ll check out the twitter, thank you for the reference!

    Thanks again and see you tomorrow!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *