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ranked our bodies against the bodies of others, deciding they are greater or
lesser than our own based on the prejudices and biases we inherited.
Dismantling the culture of apology requires an investigation into the
anatomy of an apology. Generally, people committed to their righteousness
rarely feel the need to apologize. About five years ago I shared with an ex
how something he’d said had hurt my feelings. After twenty minutes of his
dancing around any admission of offense, it became clear this guy was not
planning to issue any apologies. According to his logic, he did not intend to
hurt my feelings and therefore did not owe me an apology. Like many
people, he felt that his intention should have absolved him from his impact.
I countered his reasoning by asking, “If you accidently stepped on
someone’s foot, would you say sorry?” “No, not if their foot was the only
place to stand,” he replied matter-of-factly. (Why had I dated this guy?)
Clearly, I do not propose that we, as a species, adopt this sort of
thoughtless, self-centered ideology, but sometimes even jerks can lead us to
epiphanies. There was something about his refusal to apologize for what he
saw as taking up the space he needed that, if wielded authentically, might
change how we move through the world. Why are we consistently
apologizing for the space we inhabit? What if we all understood the
inherent vastness of our humanity and therefore occupied the world without
apology? What if we all became committed to the idea that no one should
have to apologize for being a human in a body? What if we made room for
every body so that no one ever had to stand on someone else’s foot? How
might we change our lives? How might we change the world?
Radical Reflection
Our freedom from body shame demands that we look at how we have
perpetuated shame in others. We will need to be radically honest on
this journey.
The planet is a big, daunting place. It is easy to feel at the whim of the
universe. We have been convinced we are ineffectual at exacting any real
change against our social systems and structures, so instead we land the