Bad habit...

I'm sitting in a park close to work to eat my lunch and I can't stop thinking about the question that plagued me for most of yesterday and definitely made it hard to sleep... Why is it so hard sometimes to say sorry, especially for the big things where you very clearly are in the wrong? Why is it so hard to just fucking say,

"I fucked up, I seriously wronged you and I'm sorry. I let you become an afterthought and betrayed your trust in me to be a person who has your best interests at heart. I hope you can forgive me.  I know it will take time to forgive me if you can at all, and if there's anything I can do to make it up to you, please let me know. "

What is so fucking hard about that? But it is... it'd been a while since I had that gut feeling of "oh fuck, I misstepped, that wasn't okay". I tried to downplay it, come up with all sorts of reasons as to why it wasn't that big a deal, while maybe it was even deserved, that I no longer owed that person anything. But even if the argument of it being deserved had valid points, I firmly know two wrongs never make a right. Yet I was still trying to justify my lack of culpability...even our laws say that crimes that were not premeditated are less serious, so does that count when you betray someone's right to privacy even if it's been your life too?

I wasn't even going to own up to what I'd done, I didn't have to, there was very little chance it'd ever come to light and I definitely knew if I did, it'd probably change the way this person viewed me forever. But even when I decided they deserved to know, I minimized it for what it was, downplayed it and interjected my justifications instead of just fucking saying I was sorry.

In the ensuing exchange they called me calculating and manipulative and that I have no self discipline and I can't stop zeroing in on that because I know that there's truth to that. Even if I didn't have malicious intentions with anything I had done... There were still always desired outcomes, my own agenda, sometimes even at their expense. My dad used to always call out how manipulative I was as a child, something that always made me feel so terrible about myself... I remember growing up knowing I was the bad kid in our family, nice wasn't a word used to describe me, and I know I spent a lot of my adolescents trying to shed that. I wanted to be nice, I wanted to be helpful, I wanted to be good.

Currently it is hard to feel like I am any of those things, but I know this is only a temporary feeling, but a necessary one. One to stew in and decide what needs to change, and how will I do that. How do I accurately assess hidden motives when I believe "I'm just being honest". I definitely believe honesty is paramount in all relationships, but only when it's asked for... Sharing your feelings when someone doesn't want to hear them is selfish and I think that is what has taken me way too long to understand.

I scheduled a therapy session this morning for later this week and I'm looking forward to it. I have no desire to just beat myself up, I want help identifying roots to why I lack self discipline on many fronts...but specifically in the department of understanding that not everyone is an open book like me and that even when someone doesn't explicitly ask me not to share something about their life, there really is this underlying understanding of privacy that I have violated on numerous occasions for multiple people.  It usually hasn't been a super big thing, but this last time, it definitely was and this is not a trait or a habit I want to posess anymore.