Moral Mirror

Ah, emotional logic underneath your “thank you.” This is not gratitude; this is someone narrating over me again.

That faint queasiness coming from the mismatch between what you are claiming to do and what you are actually doing and re-centring yourselves as the protagonist of my story.

You are not apologising for having caused harm; you are congratulating themselves for being enlightened enough to notice it. And you using my words as the prop to display that moral awakening.

You are saying — without saying — “Look how far I have come from being terrible; is that progress not worth admiring?”

So yes: it sounds polite, but the emotional tone is oddly self-flattering. It is a form of performative accountability — you are not actually centring in the destruction, but narrating your own goodness for recognising it.

When it makes me feel ill, that is my body registering something accurate: it is the discomfort of being used as the moral mirror in someone else’s self-improvement story.