SocietyOctober 10, 2024

Help Me Hera: I’m so apologetic I’m annoying everyone around me

Contributing writer

Being too apologetic might make me sound insincere, but I genuinely am sorry about everything. Help!

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera,

Inspired by Chatty Cathy’s recent letter to you, I suddenly realised that “oh, maybe I can ask for Hera’s advice, instead of just wishing an angel could descend from the heavens, bop me on the head, and cure me of my problems.”

I have a similar problem to Cathy, but a little to the left. Instead of being overly talkative to the point of annoying everybody, I am overly *apologetic*, to the point of annoying everybody – even myself! Being too apologetic might make me sound like an insincere person, but the problem is that I genuinely *am* sorry about everything. I feel like I’m rude when I email people, or take them up on offers freely provided, or eat food shared with me, or or or (envision a seal here if you must)…

I’m keenly aware that I’m socially awkward. I behave really well when I am in a “role”, but suck at talking to people in more casual settings, and often struggle to stop a conversation from dying. When I do manage to speak, I’m invariably apologising for *something*, and now I’m worried that I’m cheesing everybody off!

Help me please, Hera!

Nervous Nellie

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear NN,

I will admit up front I’m an apology apologist. As a longtime fan of the grovelling cultures (Minnesota, Canada, Japan) I believe a little performative humility is the social glue that holds the fabric of our society together.

I may be in the minority here. There was a time in recent memory where you couldn’t open a Sunday magazine without encountering an article with a title like “Sorry Not Sorry: Why Women Should Reclaim Their Power and Stop Apologising.” The radical feminist theory underpinning this seemed to be that men don’t apologise nearly as much as women do, and if men do something it must be good.

Maybe this advice makes sense in the boardroom. But most of the time, saying “sorry, but I ordered the Halibut,” isn’t damning linguistic evidence of a female inferiority complex, but a harmless conversational lubricant we use to show others we’re not assholes.

Being a chronic over-apologiser is a different problem.

It seems clear from your letter that you suffer from some pretty intense social anxiety, and worry your presence is a burden to others. First of all, this sucks and I hate this for you. Feeling like you have to constantly apologise for the fact of your existence is no way to live. Cutting down on your apologies isn’t going to solve the big issue here, and my main recommendation is to work on consciously building up your self-esteem because you seem like a lovely person who is unnecessarily haunted by the idea that you’re not good enough for others.

However, I think your interpretation of why people find over-apologising awkward is a little off. You don’t want others to think you’re insincere. But I’m willing to bet your sincerity is precisely the issue.

An apology is usually a call and response. One person apologises and the other person replies “no worries.” I wonder if over-apologising is your way of unintentionally seeking reassurance from others that you’re not bothering them and they don’t secretly hate you? The problem with constantly seeking reassurance is that it quickly becomes exhausting to be around. When you batter people with apologies, you’re unintentionally showing them you secretly fear they’re judging you harshly, which isn’t a great way to build trust and camaraderie. Nervousness is contagious, and by constantly calling attention to your own discomfort in social settings, you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So what can be done?

It can be hard to kick a conversational habit cold turkey. But as a first step, you could try replacing the word “sorry” with “thanks.”

I hate to admit it, but this ubiquitous “customer service lifehack” seems to work. Telling a line of angry customers “Thank you so much for your patience” is a million times more effective than saying “Sorry for the long wait.” Most nervous apologies can be easily reimagined as expressions of gratitude, and they work a lot better because people like being thanked a lot more than they like being apologised to.

a line of dice with blue dots

I’m not saying it works in every context. “Thank you for being so understanding that I ran over your dog” is not an acceptable employment of the foundational principles. But let’s take a better example. You say you feel rude when people share food with you. But apologising to someone who has offered you a plate of dinner is a lot unintentionally ruder than learning how to give a warm and sincere thank you. An apology makes the situation all about you and your discomfort. A thank you makes it all about their kindness.

I know this is not an easy habit to break. For some people, it can be a million times harder to accept the love and generosity of others than it is to accept their blame and criticism. But it’s an important thing to learn to do because it will set you free.

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’

Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor

It took me a long time to realize that accepting help from others is a wise and righteous thing to do because people genuinely love to help. At the risk of sounding like Dale Carnegie, one of those annoying business “hacks” which I believe in my heart to be true (simply because I know it would work on me) is that a good way to get someone on your side is to ask them for a favour. As far as I can tell, the secret psychological reason this works boils down to the fact that most people like other people, and are flattered and proud when given an opportunity to help them.

Yes, you should stop apologising so much. But not because you’re a bad person who is secretly irritating everyone you come into contact with. It should be part of a wider quest to learn to trust that, for the most part, people wish you well and have your best interests at heart. Even if you don’t really believe it, this is one of those situations in which I would strongly recommend the “fake it till you make it” approach. Learning to feel safe in the company of others isn’t as easy as changing your vocabulary. But changing your vocabulary might be a step in the right direction.

Keep going!

John Campbell new true crime series The Woman at The Bottom of the Stairs is streaming on TVNZ+

Pop CultureOctober 9, 2024

Review: John Campbell, true crime and a taste of TVNZ’s new era

Lyric Waiwiri-Smith

Politics reporter

John Campbell new true crime series The Woman at The Bottom of the Stairs is streaming on TVNZ+

TVNZ’s latest investigative series delves into true crime, and gives us an idea of where the future of the network’s news is heading.

It took two years and multiple emails from John Campbell for Mandy Molloy to feel that her daughter Rachel’s sudden death in 2022 was finally being treated seriously by police. At the end of his new series The Woman At the Bottom of The Stairs, Campbell tells Molloy the story they’ve uncovered together is that of a mother’s love. More cynically, it’s a story about the ways in which police failed a vulnerable woman.

In six 15-minute episodes, Campbell tells the story – sometimes linear, sometimes not – of the circumstances that led to Rachel’s death in May 2022. Rachel was a month away from giving evidence for her own sexual assault case – she was allegedly drugged and raped following a burglary in 2020 – when she was found dead at the bottom of the front stairs of her Mt Eden flat. Through interviews with Molloy and OIA releases, Campbell doesn’t get to the bottom of how or why Rachel died, instead uncovering how long you can ask a question before someone finally listens to you.

Rachel was counted as one of numerous New Zealanders who die every year in circumstances that are considered sudden or accidental. In the mind of her mother, Rachel’s death was anything but – though trying to convince the police of the same thing seemed impossible, or for the “too hard” basket.

In piece-to-camera segments shot from Campbell’s desk in the TVNZ office, with his Hurricanes jersey draped over his chair and Thank You cards stuck to his computer screen, he unwraps Rachel’s story. If you’re expecting the kind of big budget true crime productions Netflix offers, you’ll find something a lot more stripped back and focused on the news gathering processes in Campbell’s series.

The show has few voices – Campbell, Molloy, the TVNZ staffers pulled in to voice emails sent by police (no NZ Police officer fronted the show, and their lack of physical presence leaves a hanging shadow throughout the episodes) and Dr Jocelyn Peach, a Victim Support worker assigned to Rachel’s case. The third episode examines Peach’s involvement with the family, and how the handling of Rachel’s case eventually pushed her to leave Victim Support.

Mandy Molloy, mother of Rachel, has fought for years to find understanding in her eldest child’s death.

The episodes are also presented in the style of an extended news bulletin, rather than a true crime docuseries in the vein of Making a Murderer or The Staircase. This removes that weirdly exploitative feeling most Netflix productions come with, but it also feels slightly awkward at times, with some odd editing flourishes (like having Campbell’s redacted OIA documents surround his face rather than having their own frame) and segments that feel like they may have been filmed the day before release (with the ramping up of events in the final episode, this may actually have been the case).

But the series also offers a glimpse into the future of TVNZ, and a way for 1News to establish its own style of video news and “content”. With Sunday scrapped and the 1News website headed for the same fate, as is reportedly being proposed, The Woman at The Bottom of The Stairs gives TVNZ another shot at owning longform video investigations that other outlets may not have the resources for.

The “content” released so far is powered by senior journalists like Campbell, Indira Stewart and Gill Higgins, who have had years of experience in front of and behind the camera, and know their way around challenging stories.

With this perspective, Campbell also breaks down how difficult it can be to secure OIA documents, being seen as a “media risk” and fobbed off by those you’re relying on for answers, which gives the audience a better understanding of the obstacles journalists face and why some questions are left hanging. Hopefully the juniors who may be at risk of losing their jobs at TVNZ have a pathway to make more of this kind of meaningful longform news as well.

It’s taken over a year for Molloy and Campbell to tell Rachel’s story, drawn out by back and forth with NZ Police and the fact that Campbell probably has another handful of stories on the go at any given time. Once you get used to seeing a true crime-esque series presented more as a news bulletin than a high production Netflix offering, the grim reality of the story at hand sets in: a woman who had lived through terrible trauma and struggled to have her voice heard was still ignored in death.

A coronial inquest can take as long as three years to be released. It may find that Rachel did die from a tragic accident, or it may reveal something darker. For now, Molloy can at least sleep a little more peacefully knowing someone has actually listened – but maybe if the people with the most power in these instances had listened earlier, she’d already know what happened to her daughter.