What we give — and receive — with the words, 'I'm sorry'

I was 18, waiting in the parking lot of my old grammar school to interview for a locally-funded college scholarship, when a former friend — and bully — approached me.

On a spectrum of popularity, he ranked highly. I was on the opposite end. We were last friends when we were single-digit-aged boys, riding bikes around his neighborhood in Sudbury, Massachusetts, popping wheelies. At his 9th birthday party a division became clear. I retreated into myself as he and the other boys found common ground around girls, sports and horror movies, none of which I liked. This would be my last invitation to a party with the cool boys, and one I’d also remember for my friend’s palpable rage, his tongue loose around cuss words and insults. I saw little hope of staying connected to the person he was becoming.

My next concrete memory of him is from the early days of high school, freshman year. A classmate of ours, a close friend of mine, came out of the closet at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in 1991, in a moment that for years people would refer to as “the incident.” After she outed herself to a group of popular boys that confronted her in the cafeteria, the day spiraled into chaos. Our peers cornered her in a hallway, threw pens, pencils and notebooks at her and forced her to flee out an emergency exit door. At the end of the day, my childhood  friend raged from the back of the bus, spitting out gay epithets and making gagging sounds, riling up his pack of wild cool boys. I sank low in my seat near the front, sweating in my own closet, praying he didn’t link me by association to her and her new Queer identity.

For most of high school I avoided him like I did most of our peers — as I helped grow the school’s gay-straight alliance, as I came out late that spring, as I organized a Gay Awareness Day our junior year. I didn’t think of him when I went around the state talking to educators about the importance of the Safe Schools Program that went into effect in Massachusetts two years after “the incident.” My former friend’s vehemence was, however, why I was doing the work while still in high school, so that people like me could have protection from people like him.

I wish I could tell the teenage version of myself about the life he’d build.

Fast forward three years from that bus ride, however, and there we were in the parking lot. He said hi, casually, like we were 8 years old again. Then he told me he was sorry for how he’d treated our friend when she came out, and by extension how he treated me. He said he’d been angry. He’d not even known what at, but he was wrong to take any of his own baggage out on me or my friend because of who we are.

The moment stunned me. His apology felt sincere, like he saw the hurt he’d exposed me to and wanted to fix it. It couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes, and is now nearly 30 years ago, yet that apology is a moment I think of often. It was a first for me — when someone, unprovoked, said “I’m sorry.”

In college when I began attending Al-Anon meetings as the son of an alcoholic, I saw grown adults weep at how apologizing to their loved ones had transformed both the recipient and the giver. It’s a lesson no one in my family ever taught me: to say “I’m sorry” to people I know I’ve hurt.

I’ve been with my husband Dave for 15 years, and since I didn’t have many healthy relationship models growing up, I’ve done a lot of making it up as I go along. Early on, when he’d do something that hurt my feelings, he’d say, “I didn’t intend to hurt you,” as though intention was a prerequisite for an apology. And while I too never intend to hurt my husband — he’s hands down my favorite person — our more peaceful years came after we both recognized our own capacity to hurt each other and started to willingly apologize, regardless of intent. “I’m sorry” are two free words that have strengthened us again and again. From “I’m sorry,” we usually move on to “I forgive you,” and then back to the joy that’s at the center of our relationship.

While the apology from my childhood friend was the only one I ever received from my peers, years later I realized those two words helped begin to heal a wound that my home community and larger society had opened for me as a young Queer person. I wish I could tell the teenage version of myself about the life he’d build.

I imagine what it feels like for Queer youth today, particularly trans youth, as who they are becomes fodder for political debate, as some face rulings that will undercut their want to be themselves. I know well what it means to feel one’s potential stunted simply because of who you know you are. I know it can feel violent and dangerous, and isolating. I also know the power of community to ease the accompanying ache. And, I know what it means to have someone who once screamed “I hate who you are” turn a corner, apologize and stand beside you instead. I know how an open heart, and an acknowledgement of hurt inflicted, can begin to address a wound.

My old friend and I never became particularly close again, but that last year of high school we always said hi in the hallways. When he heard me sing at a school concert or at our graduation, he went out of his way to find me and tell me how beautiful he thought my voice was. If the “I’m sorry” was transformative, then the effort to connect and be peacefully together was a bridge, an opportunity for repair.

Through social media, I watch as the teenagers who tormented me have grown up and now have children of their own. I’ve wondered, are they raising their kids to treat others the way they did? With at least one old friend, though, I don’t worry. He showed me, 30 years ago, that change is possible.

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