I’d been seeing my therapist for about eight months when she said something I wasn’t expecting. We were wrapping up a session — nothing particularly heavy, just a regular Tuesday — and as I was putting my coat on she said, almost offhand: “You know, you’ve stopped apologizing for taking up time.”
I didn’t know what to do with that at first. I said something like “huh” and left. But I thought about it on the bus home, and then again before I fell asleep, turning it over. She was right. At some point in the past few months I’d stopped beginning every session with “sorry, this is probably nothing” or “I know this seems small.” I’d just started talking.
It sounds like such a minor thing. But I’ve started noticing all the other places I’d been shrinking before anyone asked me to — in conversations, in emails, in the way I ordered food at restaurants. The apologizing had been so constant I’d stopped hearing it.
Sometimes healing shows up not as a feeling but as a habit you quietly dropped without noticing — until someone points to the empty space where it used to be.