If You’re Still Waiting For Someone To Say Sorry
There is a kind of sorry that doesn’t just soothe a moment
it rewrites a life.
And if you’re still waiting for that sorry,
if some part of you is holding a breath you’ve never fully released,
you’re not alone.
Because for so many of us,
that sorry never came.
Not in the moment something first shattered inside us.
Not when our small bodies froze around a feeling we had no capacity to feel.
Not when we looked up for comfort and met confusion, or distance.
And certainly not in the moments when our hurt felt too big for the room,
too inconvenient,
too much for the adults who didn’t know how to hold it.
Those early moments shape us.
They teach us things we don’t choose.
They teach us how to survive.
I didn’t realise how much I had adapted until much later.
I didn’t know I had learned to carry everything alone,
to quiet the parts of me that needed too much tenderness,
to shrink the places that felt loud or messy,
to make myself smaller so nothing spilled out.
I thought this was simply who I was
self-contained, composed, endlessly capable.
But beneath that, the truth was rawer:
I had been shaped by an absence I couldn’t name.
And because of that absence,
every time I longed for repair from a partner and it didn’t come,
something inside me lit up with a force far older than the moment we were in.
It felt disproportionate, overwhelming.
I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me.
But my body wasn’t reacting to them.
It was reacting to the echo of a time when repair never came at all.
There was a moment long ago
when my system learned that my pain had nowhere to land,
that needing someone meant risking everything,
that confusion would be met with silence,
my truth wouldn’t be held,
and my body would have to bear more than it knew how to carry.
That moment stayed with me.
And inside every heartbreak since,
I can still feel a younger part of me listening for a different ending,
wondering if this will finally be the moment someone stays,
someone softens,
someone says, “I see what happened. I’m sorry. I’m here now.”
I’ve spent years meeting that part of me.
Years learning how to hold myself steady
in the exact moment my body wants to vanish
to apologise, to fold, to turn against itself.
And slowly, I’ve learned how to offer my own nervous system
the warmth and presence
no one knew how to offer me then.
And even now,
there are moments in relationship
when something small shifts—a pause, a silence, a missed expression
and a tightness rises in my chest that belongs to another time.
An ocean of dread that has nothing to do with the present
and everything to do with what once went missing,
swallows me up inside.
This is the work for me:
Not asking someone else to fix the past.
Not pretending they ever could.
But noticing when the grief in my body is older than the moment we’re in,
and choosing self-connection instead of abandonment.
Because the sorry that never came didn’t just mark a moment
it shaped the way I learned to love,
the way I learned to brace,
the way I learned to reach for someone while holding myself together,
the way I learned to carry both sides of a relationship
because no one ever carried mine.
Naming this isn’t blame.
It’s generational.
It’s honesty.
And for me, it has become the beginning of freedom.
Repair, for me, began the moment I stayed for one more breath
when I wanted to disappear.
The moment I softened toward myself
instead of collapsing into shame.
The quiet promise
that I won’t walk away from myself again.
And if something aches in you as you read this
if emotion rises, trembles, thickens
let it.
It isn’t a flaw.
It isn’t too much.
It’s the part of you that waited far too long
to be met with tenderness.
Stay with them if you can.
Stay with the one inside you who never stopped hoping for that moment of being seen.
You’re with them now.
And that matters more than you know.
