December 6, 2025
Apologies are strange little things. On the surface, they look clean. Polite. Mature. The kind of thing you teach your kids because it makes you feel like you are sending decent humans out into the world. But when Ambrose Bierce throws a line like this at you, suddenly the whole act of apologizing starts to feel like walking across a rickety bridge you have crossed one too many times. You say sorry, but deep down you know you are probably going to end up back here again.
That is the part we do not talk about. We think apologies are supposed to fix things. Smooth everything out. Reset the clock. But more often, they reveal something uncomfortable. They reveal patterns. Not just that we fall short, but that we fall short in familiar ways. Our mistakes have favorite rooms in the house. They know where the snacks are. They get the mail delivered there.
Bierce is not saying we should not apologize. He is saying that apology is not the cure. It is the diagnosis. The first step in admitting we are repeat offenders in our own lives. And honestly, I can feel that in my bones. I have apologized for the same tone. The same impatience. The same reflexive reaction that comes out faster than my better judgment. A younger version of me probably believed that once you said sorry, the mistake evaporated. Grown up me knows better. Grown up me knows that tomorrow morning, with too little sleep and too much happening at once, I will probably get another lap around the same track.
But that does not make the apology meaningless. In fact, it makes it more important. An apology is not the end of the mistake. It is the beginning of the self-awareness that keeps you from becoming a brick wall that other people have to scale. It is the moment you acknowledge that the relationship matters more than your ego. It is the moment you stop pretending you are flawless and admit you are here to get better, one imperfect try at a time.
When I apologize now, I try to treat it less like a magic eraser and more like a building permit. This is where I messed up. This is the room I am renovating. This is where the relationship needs a little reinforcement. I cannot promise I will never do it again. But I can promise I am paying attention. I can promise I am learning the patterns and trying to shift them. And sometimes that matters more than the fantasy of perfection.
It reminds me of moments where overwhelm hits harder than it should, like the time I wrote about how bad news is really just news, depending on how you receive it. When life gets loud, old patterns come roaring back. You find yourself apologizing for the same things you apologized for last week. Maybe even yesterday. But the difference is that you notice it. You do not shrug it off. You do not hide behind excuses. Maybe that is what Bierce meant by foundation. Not the foundation for the next offense, but the foundation for the next attempt at being someone worth trusting.
There is a humility in knowing you will mess up again. But there is also hope in knowing that you are trying not to. Apologies are not receipts for perfection. They are reminders that we are human. Messy. Predictable. Capable of change, even if that change happens slowly and unevenly.
So yes, apology might be the first brick in the next mistake. But it is also the first brick in the next version of you. And that version is always worth building.
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