Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast.

Kelly here.

And earlier this week, we did an episode about opting out of over-apologizing.

And that episode was all about how to stop yourself from saying sorry

too much, which is an epidemic, particularly in the professional world and just in the personal

world of women. But we also talked about how to opt out of apologizing for the way you live

your life, the choices you make, what brings you joy and what doesn't.

But I didn't want to close the week without bringing the counterside to that, which is that we live in a

world where people just don't say sorry enough. Usually it's not women. Or we don't give meaningful

apologies. So we overuse the word sorry and we over-apologize to the point

where it loses its meaning. And we've all been there before where we basically are brushing by someone,

don't even look at them in the face, accidentally might hit him. We're like, sorry, we just keep moving.

That sorry probably feels somewhat empty to

the person who experienced it. I've been on both sides of that, been the one giving the terrible sorry.

And I've also been the one that's getting brush past and then someone says, sorry, like just

as an afterthought, sorry becomes a word that has lost its meaning. And I think it's really important

that we talk about how to give meaning back into that and how to apologize in a way that

makes a difference. We've all been victims of poor apologies and we've all been aggressors or transgressors, I guess would be the

word, of giving a bad apology. It's a universal problem. But I feel like for black women,

we have often had such historical, poor apologies, like culturally, poor apologies, that we are not sure of what

to expect from an apology, what it should look like, and how apologies, when done well,

can change dynamics, improve relationships, and mend pain, emotional pain. And so I wanted to spend some times talking

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