So I'm writing a carefully nuanced apology to someone who got burned in my article last week. The entry from "Forward Day by Day" yesterday was all about forgiveness, and the vague undertones about not carrying a world's weight of guilt on our backs. That's a hell of a tough thing to take on mentally every day. Taking it on at the end of a day might work. You've made your mistakes, committed your sins, and now it is time to embrace and seek forgiveness and call it a day, rather than beat yourself up. Yup.
Problem is, the next day, you get up, and keep making mistakes, and keep sinning, and hurting people, and doing things wrong, and basically screwing up your life and every other life in reach on a cosmic level. And... that's where it's no longer a matter of asking for forgiveness and letting go of the beating-yourself-up impulse. In this world we're all pretty closely tied together; it's nearly impossible for our actions to effect only ourselves. We need to seek forgiveness from everyone else, too. Frequently. Constantly. Which means humbling yourself. A lot.
See, this article I wrote talked to a handful of people about the resignation of someone on campus. What they told me was that he'd been asked to resign over a fairly nasty scandal that had happened to folks in/under his authority, which he hadn't stopped. No one would give details on the record, because one of the principals of the story was still in proximity. So I had a story that was supposed to be a little brush-up that turned into a scandal half-told. What I should have done was told my boss that we couldn't run the article until I had a chance to dig the story up in full. But it was two days to print, and I had another article to finish, and classwork, so I printed it - as much of it as I could back up without delving, I thought, into overly personal issues - and left it.
There are a few people who were mentioned - necessarily - in the first two paragraphs, who are quite unhappy about the tone. Understandably so. I didn't have enough to give the full story, so I gave what I could: folks were unhappy, sources say the environment was negative, and HR investigated and fired people. And then I talked about the positive forward movement in the new staff they're hoping for.
I've now heard from two of the people who are unhappy about it. I'm trying to work out a way to apologize - because honestly and sincerely, that is something I need to do. My haste to get the story out led to them both getting an unfair rap, and my name is on that article. Those are my words, and I used them wrongly. That requires an apology.
But... at the same time, there was a scandal, and telling "the other side" does not mean I can just brush off what I've been told. So I'm trying to figure out how to word an apology that says, sincerely, "I screwed up, and I'm sorry, and I will do anything in my power to rectify that," but also to clarify that there's nothing I can do to change the facts, and the answer to telling a story without one side is not to go back and tell the story again, but without the other side. "I screwed up, but I can't screw up again intentionally in your favor?"
Or the simplest, "I'm sorry. Please give me another chance to write this and piss off all sides equally."
Life is just so much easier as a theoretical exercise.
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