One of the things that I am cursed with is a long memory. I mean that sincerely: it’s long, detailed, and organized by grievance. I carry a full archive of the slights I’ve endured and, more specifically, a quiet inventory of the apologies that never came.
I grew up in an African household, the last of three children and the only girl. I was, and will always be, a daddy’s girl. I knew how to work my father. Whenever I wanted anything, I’d present my case, wear him down with persistence, and inevitably, he would fold. He was a soft touch, and I knew it, and I loved him wildly for it. Then he passed away when I was 13, and overnight, everything I had taken for granted vanished.
It was like being thrust into an alternate reality, except nobody else seemed to notice the shift. Being the youngest in an African household already means you have to be louder, scrappier, and more persistent just to be heard. My father had been a buffer against the sharpness of that. There was a running joke in the family: the moment I started crying, he would materialize out of nowhere, like Batman. Nobody was going to be mean to his girl, at least not on his watch. When he died, that buffer went with him. Suddenly, my opinions were debatable. My feelings were inconvenient. The softness people had shown me because of him, I understand now, quietly faded. And when I was hurt, I was just hurt. Nobody said sorry. Nobody said anything. The silence was its own kind of wound.
I spent my teenage years living two very different lives. At school, I was loud, outspoken, and generally easygoing, the version of myself that felt safe to exist. At home, I became an observer. Everything felt tense and braced. Every opinion I offered had to be defended. I think my father had carried a gentleness into our home without any of us fully knowing it, and in his absence, I felt that loss in every room. I was learning, slowly and without instruction, how to survive without it.
After high school, I moved to the US for college, and the world got harsher still. There is a particular way that people speak to Black, fat girls; it’s a way that slowly erodes decency and kindness, until what’s left feels like cruelty. I know that way well. I was on the receiving end of it constantly, sometimes so regularly I stopped being surprised. I just absorbed it and kept moving.
Over time, I learned to read a room before I could relax in it. I found myself needing to know, before I let my guard down, whether the people around me had the capacity for empathy. Whether they could hold space for someone who looked like me, who moved through the world like me. I was scanning for safety constantly, a habit that forms when you’ve been hurt enough times in enough rooms.
And still, the accumulation of all of it, all those years of absorbed cruelty and unacknowledged hurt, was doing something to me inside. Researchers call this the allostatic load: it’s the cumulative wear and tear on the body and brain from chronic stress. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but I felt it. When I started therapy in 2018, one of the threads we kept pulling on was resentment. All the things I had been carrying for far too long. All the insults, the dismissals, the harsh words directed at little bear me, my teenage self, the one I think of as little bear, because I love bears, and she needed a tender name. It took years. Years of sitting with those feelings, of naming them, of slowly, painstakingly choosing to stop letting them define me. Forgiveness, I learned, is not about excusing what happened. It’s about choosing yourself instead.
The body knows. It always knows. In the summer of 2024, I had a particularly difficult argument with my mother. The kind that sits in your chest long after the words are done. What I didn’t expect was that it would sit in my chest quite so literally. I developed a cough that lasted for months. A real, persistent, disruptive cough. I saw doctors. I saw specialists. My throat was fine. My lungs were fine. Everything was fine, except that nothing was fine. Finally, after a couple of months, I had a full come-to-Jesus moment in a therapy session, and everything finally surfaced. I cried. I said the things I’d been keeping locked in my ribcage. I went home and had the deepest sleep I can remember. The next morning, the cough was gone.
So here is what I know now, on the other side of all of it: the apologies are not coming. Some of them, at least. Not from the people who were unkind in the ways that cut deepest. Not from anyone who never thought what they did was wrong. And I have had to make peace with that. This is not because I was wrong to want them, but because waiting for them was costing me too much. I have learned to sit with anger when it arrives. To let it be real for a moment, or a day. And then to release it, let it move through me like water, and not let it find a permanent home in my body. The body keeps score. I’ve lived that truth. I’d rather not keep paying for others’ bad behaviour.
And as for you, I see you. The ones carrying a whole weight of unacknowledged things. The ones who are still waiting, still replaying, still wondering if you’ll ever get the “I’m sorry” you needed. I am deeply sorry you didn’t get it. You deserved it. You still do. But I want you to know that you don’t have to keep holding it for them. You can set it down and leave it here, with me, and walk out lighter. I’ll carry it for a little while. You go fly.
