The list has gotten shorter every year.
I used to apologize for taking up space in a conversation, for having a strong opinion, for being right in a room where being right by a woman was read as aggression rather than accuracy. I used to apologize for my needs as though my needs were an imposition, as though the having of them was already too much and the naming of them required an apology for the naming on top of an apology for the need itself.
I no longer apologize for needing rest.
That one took the longest. The rest-apology was the deepest one, the one with the most roots, the one that had been growing since childhood in the soil of a culture that taught me that a woman’s worth was her output and her rest was therefore a deficit, a subtraction from the total, something to be explained and justified and kept brief and followed by visible productivity to prove that the resting had not been excessive.
I no longer apologize for my feelings taking the amount of space they take.
I no longer apologize for leaving a party when I am tired rather than performing energy I do not have for an audience that will not remember whether I was there until eleven. I no longer apologize for saying no to things that cost me more than they give back. I no longer apologize for the writing, for the time it takes, for treating the writing as a legitimate use of a morning when there are other things the morning could be used for.
I am not done. There are still apologies I issue reflexively, the small ones, the sorry-for-existing ones that come out before I have authorized them, the ones that are so habitual they arrive before consciousness and require a separate act of will to retract. I am working on those.
But the list is shorter.
Every year the list gets shorter and the space I take up gets closer to the actual space I need, and the woman who is learning to stand in her actual space without apology is someone I am glad to be becoming, even now, even late, even imperfectly.
Especially now. Especially late. Especially imperfectly.
