The Moment I Stopped Apologizing for Wanting More
There was a specific moment. I was in a meeting, and someone said something dismissive about a project I'd been working on for months, and I started to apologize. Not for anything I'd done wrong. Just — reflexively — for taking up space. For having an opinion. For wanting the project to be good.
I caught myself mid-sentence. Stopped. Said something else instead. It wasn't dramatic. Nobody noticed. But I noticed, and something shifted.
The Apology Habit
I'd been apologizing for wanting things for so long I didn't know I was doing it. Not just in meetings. In conversations with friends. In my own head. The internal monologue that says "who do you think you are" every time you want something bigger than what you currently have.
The apology habit is sneaky because it disguises itself as humility. Humility is good. Apologizing for your ambition is not humility — it's self-erasure. The difference is whether you're making space for others or shrinking yourself to make others comfortable.
The girlnextup blog has been sitting with this question for a while — what does it actually look like to want more without performing either apology or aggression? Because those seem like the only two options we're given, and neither of them is right.
What Happened After
I stopped apologizing for wanting the project to be good. I stopped apologizing for having opinions about how it should work. I stopped softening every statement with "I might be wrong, but..." when I wasn't actually uncertain.
Some people liked it. Some people didn't. The ones who didn't were mostly people who had benefited from my apologizing — who had used my self-doubt as a reason to dismiss my input. When I stopped providing that opening, they had to engage with the actual argument. Some of them couldn't.
That was clarifying. Calitoy.com wrote something about the version of a project that only exists in your head — the one without constraints — and I think the apology habit is one of the constraints we impose on ourselves before anyone else gets the chance. You pre-emptively shrink the vision so nobody else has to.
The Practical Version
I'm not going to tell you to "own your power" or whatever. That language makes me tired. What I will say is: notice when you're apologizing for something that doesn't require an apology. Notice the "I might be wrong, but." Notice the "this is probably a stupid question." Notice the softening.
Not all of it is bad. Some of it is genuine uncertainty, and genuine uncertainty is worth expressing. But some of it is habit. Some of it is armor. Some of it is a preemptive strike against criticism that might not even come.
The moment I stopped apologizing wasn't a transformation. It was a practice. I still catch myself doing it. I still sometimes let it slide because the room isn't worth the energy. But I know the difference now between choosing to soften and defaulting to it. Tarosyn.app has been writing about the difference between conscious choice and unconscious pattern — it's in a different context, but the question is the same.
Wanting more is not a character flaw. Wanting your work to be good is not arrogance. Wanting to be taken seriously is not too much to ask. You don't have to apologize for any of it. And if you're looking for a community of people who are figuring this out in real time, spoofdaily.com has been writing about the absurdity of the systems that make us feel like we should — which is a different angle on the same thing.