I love painting. This works out pretty well because my partner, Teresa, loves decorating, and sometimes the same room must be painted several times, a different color each time, before we get it just right.

About six months ago I painted our entire basement. When I was done, the walls were the color of a fresh warm cup of coffee with cream. I thought this looked pretty good. As it turns out, we needed to spice things up with a little red. Who knew? So we (as in Teresa) decided it was time to paint again.

This is where the story takes an unfortunate turn. While happily changing the walls to red, I managed to spill quite a big puddle (yes, puddle -- not drop) of paint on our carpet. Red paint, by the way, is no friend of carpet – at all.

After diligently applying every stain-removing chemical I could get my hands on, the red began to fade. Unfortunately, the puddle morphed into a larger pink circle. At this point I was certain my newly designed pink carpet was not going to fit into Teresa’s plans for our basement. After every attempt to right my wrong, there was only one thing left to do. I marched upstairs, confessed my mistake to Teresa, and said, “I’m sorry.”

That’s what we do when we make mistakes, right? We apologize. When I apologize it means “I did something wrong” (like spilling paint on the carpet). ”I wish I hadn’t, and I’m not able to fix my mistake (even after trying every product on the market today), and I’m sorry.” It means, “I want to do better next time.”

We apologize for behaviors – the things we do or don’t do. I didn’t always understand the proper use of an apology. In fact, there was a time in my life when I apologized for everything. Someone would bump into me while I was minding my own business, in my own space, and I’d instinctively respond with, “Oops, I’m sorry.”

The best lesson I got with apologies, though, came a couple decades ago when my mom gently tugged me out of the closet with her questions. The first thing I said to her after confirming that, yes, I am a lesbian, was, “I am so sorry.” Her response taught me a very valuable lesson about when to NOT use this phrase. She said to me, “You have done nothing wrong; you have nothing to apologize for.” (That, by the way, is not what she said when I wrecked her car.)

Being gay was not something I “did”; it was something I was -- it’s something I am.  I was apologizing for something I could not make better. There was no way for me to do “better next time.”

At the time, what I was sorry for was that I was a lesbian -- a truth I fought for years, a truth that I worked hard to ignore, a truth I tried to “fix,” to make go away.  My being gay was something that neither she nor I could change. Luckily for me, she never tried to change this; only I did.

In time, I discovered that we can not simultaneously love ourselves AND believe that who we are is fundamentally harmful to those we love. Can you ever really be true to those you love if you are not true to yourself? I hear men and women share so many reasons for not living their truth:

• “They (parents, siblings, friends) have enough stress to deal with; I don’t need to add to it.”
• “I don’t want them to be bothered with this.”
• “I can’t do that to my parents; it would kill them.”
• “It’s selfish to burden them with my issues.”

I hear these words as “I am sorry for who I am and how my existence may affect you. Therefore, I will protect you from who I really am so that you do not have to be harmed by the truth of my existence.”  And then “I don’t have to bear the pain of believing I’ve disappointed you.” Living your life as though you were a mistake, as though you are not worthy, goes beyond believing you have DONE something wrong; it suggests you believe you ARE something wrong.

Thanks to my mom, I learned very early in my process that while I certainly have my own share of quirks and flaws for which I may need to apologize from time to time, being gay is not one of them. And as for our carpet, the very large pink circle downstairs serves as a great reminder to me that drop cloths just might be a great idea, like Teresa had suggested in the first place.