I agree with you in that we are talking across each other here. I think we're talking about the same thing, but in very different ways and from distinctly different angles.

And I think we are talking about completely different things. Sorry, but I do. You keep referring to hurt, and I keep talking about injury.

If "sorry" is not what you want or need, then what else works for you? What do you require? I'm asking so that I can better understand how to relate to you and to other people who's reactions to "sorry" are not the same as mine.

First aid.

I'm being glib, but I've been using physical examples all along, and those aren't just metaphors. I've fallen off a fucking cliff ferchrisakes, I didn't ask the cliff to apologize for hurting me. I didn't ask the guy who raped me to apologize. (Although I might have asked him to die if I thought he would do it.) I'm never going to get an apology from all the various things that killed all those old friends that I will never see again.

And I know I'm beginning to get extreme in my examples, but obviously I'm having a hard time explaining what I mean, so the rediculous examples are coming out in an attempt to get my point across.

And I apologize right here and now for feeling this way, because I know it's horribly dismissive, but every time you respond to my talking about "hurt" by saying, "when somebody hurts my feelings", my immediate gut-level reaction is to think that this is reasoning that could only come from somebody who has never been beaten up.

And I think the conversation had digressed from the original topic anyway -- way back when I was grousing about fragility, I was thinking about how when I was a little kid, my playmates would hit me with a stick and I would laugh, and then I would punch them and they would cry. And that it gets to be a pain in tbe ass sometimes that I forget that when somebody hits me with a stick, I still have to be freakin' careful how hard I hit them back.