Nope

One thing I’ve noticed about myself is I tend to refuse apologies—the small ones, anyway.  Someone will bump into me, maybe, and say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and my reply will be “Nope.”  It’s not that I don’t think that person is actually sorry for what they did, although with small things often an apology is more of a reflex than a true expression of remorse.  But when I consider someone’s apology to be unnecessary, I turn it away.  It’s always “nope” too, never “no,”—a very quick, blithe refusal.

I find it interesting to listen to myself do this.  It happens without my thinking about it, and I haven’t gotten to the point of awareness at which I could do something about it.  I wonder how I started doing it, whether it was an unconscious thought process or if I considered it and found this to be the best way to handle little apologies.  I wonder whether it sometimes makes me sound sarcastic, which is not my intention at all.  “I promise, I believe you are sorry, I just don’t think you need to be.”  And most interesting to me is that I didn’t really know this about myself until just a while ago.  How very complex and strange the mind is.