I've been told my entire life that I'm too apologetic. I say sorry too often for things that I shouldn't be apologizing for. The way I dress, the way I speak, if I say something that I think is funny and no one else does. I even got yelled at by one of my teachers once when I kept apologizing for being late she said it was becoming "insincere." I was taken aback. How could someone say it was insincere? But thinking back, I realized that for my entire life I had been apologizing for things I meant and honestly for things I wasn't even sorry for. And for what? To make someone that was criticizing me feel better about themselves?
I'm so sick of this bullshit. Why do we apologize so much for what we mean or when we are trying to actually stick up for ourselves, we have to apologize first? In a study conducted by the University of Waterloo in which participants were asked to participate in two studies, the first was to record a diary of daily offenses and whether they had apologized or not; women wrote that they had committed more offenses than men and also apologized more than they had. The second was to go through various offenses that were either real or imaginary and see what rating they got; men gave much less severe rating than women did for the same offenses. What the hell?
Well this is going to be me making an assumption, but if you look at women today, we are much more independent than our grandmothers, and in some aspects even our own mothers. We have been brought up in a world that is coalescing through two different aspects. On one hand, we have the older generation where being polite is supposed to be held above all else and courtesies are everything. On the other, we have the newer generation where we need to stand up for ourselves, stop apologizing, and act like we have everything together. Be cool, calm, and collected. It's a lot of demands, so for most women who are trying to be both at the same time, it's running us crazy, leading to brazen out burst...that we of course later apologize for.
I want this to stop so that for later generations of women, we don't see women that are apologizing for absolutely nothing. I don't want the episode of "Inside Amy Schumer" to become a reality. In the episode, a panel of women that have amazing accomplishments (Amy Schumer plays a doctor on there as well) start off by apologizing for various things, talking over each other, someone giving them the wrong drink, and then one of them gets there legs burned off and they all start screaming apologizes and even the women who is dying is apologizing. It's incredibly laughable until you realize how true it is. We have been taught that apologizing is the first defense in polite company when it shouldn't be.
We have to relearn that when we apologize, we are trying to say something else. We have to learn to be direct, and we have to be brazen. I don't want another generation of women to feel the need to apologize for sticking up for themselves.
