The Apology I Owed Someone and Took Three Years to Make

I had been a teaching assistant during my postgraduate programme in Chennai and at 24, in the process of a group project assessment, I had raised concerns about a student's contribution that were partly accurate and partly influenced by a personal antipathy I had allowed to colour a professional judgment.

The consequences for the student - whose grade for that component was affected and who had to navigate an appeals process that was stressful and ultimately only partially successful - were more significant than I had acknowledged to myself at the time.

I had told myself the concerns I raised were legitimate, which some of them were. I had not told myself the full version, which was that I had raised them with more certainty and less generosity than the evidence warranted, and that my personal feeling about the student had made me less careful than I should have been.

I knew this, partially and uncomfortably, almost immediately. I managed it by not thinking about it clearly - a strategy that is surprisingly effective in the short term and that produces, in the medium term, a specific background hum of dishonesty that applies low-level pressure without ever quite becoming visible.

By 26 I was no longer in academia and the student was someone I would never encounter again in a professional context, which made the apology easy to defer indefinitely.

The reasons for deferral were respectable-sounding: too much time had passed, reaching out would reopen something the person had moved on from, my acknowledgment would serve my own conscience more than it would serve them. All of these were true to a degree and were also the rationalised content of avoidance.

I found them through their social network at 27 and sent a message that took me three drafts to write - not because the words were technically difficult but because I was trying to say something honest rather than something that primarily managed my own discomfort.

The response that came back was brief and not warm and was also clearly the response of someone who had not been expecting the contact and who was not going to offer me the absolution I had not been entitled to ask for.

What I had not expected was that the absence of absolution was not the point. The point was the saying of the thing - the ending of the silent lie I had been maintaining about what I had done. I felt, after it, more like someone I could respect. That was not nothing.