I'm sorry to admit that I am a serial apologiser. It doesn't matter what the situation is, if I feel that there's even the slightest chance that I am wrong or somehow responsible for something, I will be apologising and feeling guilty for it. Sometimes I don't even have to be at all responsible for something to feel the need to apologise. I have never possessed the confidence to ever really be completely sure about things, so if something goes wrong I automatically feel that I must be somehow responsible. Or if I'm not responsible this time, I almost certainly must have made the same mistake in the past and therefore deserve to feel guilty by proxy. I do this a lot at work. No matter how sure I am about something, there's always that little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. How can I be really sure that it is the way I think it is? What if I'm remembering something incorrectly? It's the reason I can never take part in trivia nights. I am virtually incapable of remembering important or valuable or worthwhile information, but useless crap is constantly wedging itself into my brain and refusing to budge. It helps to read low-brow magazines and wander around the internet a lot, there's just so much useless crap to take in wherever I turn. I reckon I'd probably be fantastic at trivia, but I will never, ever go to an organised group event. Because the first time I'm sure of an answer, and someone else in the group challenges me, I will give in to them because their challenge will automatically make me doubt myself. And they'll be wrong. And we will lose and it will be all my fault! I just don't need another way to feel like a failure, particularly if my failure means others will also fail. And I really don't need any more guilt, I'm overburdened with that already.
I would say it's residual Catholic guilt, but I was only ever a half-hearted Catholic at best. And I didn't do the whole Catholic school thing. My religious education really only consisted of school scripture classes, and they never did concentrate much on the more guilt-inducing aspects of the Catholic faith in those. Although I am quite proud that the only time I was ever sent out of the classroom in all my years at school was during Scripture. And by a priest, no less. Oh yeah, that's as badass as it gets! Still, I never paid enough attention to religion to really develop some hard and fast religious-related guilt, so I can only assume the ridiculous guilt-ridden feeling I've lived with all my life is just somehow naturally ingrained. Although over the years I have learned to appreciate the difference between genuine guilt and doubt-induced guilt, which is much less painful, although no less real. Knowing that I've done something that is deserving of guilt and/or shame is almost unbearably awful. Feeling guilty because that's just my default position is much easier to deal with. I also have a real fear of insisting I'm right about something and being proven wrong, which would be terribly embarrassing. Much better to assume I'm wrong and occasionally turn out to be right after all. At least that way if I am wrong I'm not embarrassed or even particularly disappointed, and in a strange way I‘m actually right anyway. So either way, I win.
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