Help! The Last Time I Saw My Friend, I Said Something Atrocious. Now I’m About to See Her for Christmas.

Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here. (It’s anonymous!)

Dear Prudence,

My best friend and I have been BFFs for 35 years. We don’t live close anymore, and so I get to see her only once or twice a year. The last time I saw her, I said something truly awful. It wasn’t about her, but it must have been terrible for her to hear. I’m so ashamed. I apologized immediately, and she said to forget about it and that I wasn’t wrong. But I can’t forget about it. It’s eating me up.

I’m going to stay with her over Christmas, and I feel I need to apologize again, to show her that I didn’t just apologize quickly and move on; I’m truly sorry. But that would bring the awful topic up again, and I’m sure she doesn’t want to have that conversation a second time. I know that apologizing just to be forgiven is not a real apology, but I can’t tell if my hesitation is me being considerate or just being afraid. Do I apologize and head back to Awkward Land? Or pretend it never happened and stay on Illusion Island a while longer?

—Sorry Friend

Dear Sorry Friend,

Hmm, I’m not sure your friend is mad at you! I think all you know for sure is that, if the situation were reversed, you might have felt really hurt hearing the comment and be continuing to stew over it. Or you also could just be the sort of person who worries that people are mad at them a lot. I am too.

All you can really go on here is that your friend told you to forget about it. So, either it was truly fine—or it stung, and she really just wanted to end the conversation so you guys could move on (in which case, it may well now be totally fine). Either way, the ball is in her court to raise the issue, if she even has an ongoing concern about it. You’re right that if the subject is really fraught, she truly might not want to talk about it. Being apologized to repeatedly, about an incident you just want to move past … it’s not fun.

The exception here is if things feel awkward or off between the two of you on this next visit. Or if she said “Forget about it” in a passive-aggressive or angry manner indicating that it was clearly not something she would forget about (even still, I tend to think it’s on all of us to bring up our own issues, straightforwardly). I think in those cases, you could say something like “I hesitate to bring this up, but I wanted to check in about something that happened between us the last time I saw you, because I feel really weird about it” before diving into another apology.
That way, you can have a sense of where she stands and how she feels, rather than fishing around for what you “should” do. But also, don’t mistake smooth sailing at Christmas for an illusion. Part of being close to people is stepping on their toes sometimes, apologizing, and then moving on and just having a nice time together.

Dear Prudence,

I have an old-school etiquette question. I love sending out holiday cards; I’m single, so I can’t do the lovely-but-impersonal postcards with a photo of the family and no personal note. Instead, I get a dozen-ish pretty cards that are blank inside and write a heartfelt message to the recipient about how much their friendship over the past year has meant to me. This year, my list includes members of my all-female virtual co-working space. We’re all very close, in the freeing manner of people who don’t know the players of each other’s lives personally. For most of these women, I know their children’s names but not their husbands’. (Interesting, right?!) Is it OK for me to keep the card addressed only to my friend, with the personal note inside, and then end with something like “Wishing you and the fam a happy holiday!” to acknowledge everyone else? I don’t know if it’s rude to not include their husbands on the envelope, but the fact is I don’t know them or their names, and the message isn’t for them. And I don’t want to leave these wonderful women off the list just because they’re married and I can’t figure out how to handle it!

—Christmas Pen Pal

Dear Pen Pal,

I am not really aware of holiday card etiquette rules that exist outside the normal parameters of existence, at least not ones most Americans demand that their fellow citizens adhere to. Maybe the card zealots are out there, but I’m just glad if mine have a fighting chance of arriving at their destinations before the new year.

I would stop thinking about this as a “holiday card question” and move it into the category of “general correspondence–related concern.” And there, the answer is obvious: Married women are allowed to get mail of their own! Leave the husbands off, that’s totally fine, and your “Best wishes to the fam” line is absolutely enough. In fact, this all sounds very sweet—go forth!

Dear Prudence,

About a month ago, I had to get surgery for a majorly messed-up knee caused by a mixture of climbing and skiing. I tore my ACL, MCL, and meniscus. I let it sit and marinate for 10 months before deciding to do something about it, hoping that ignorance would cure it. All my life, I’ve been active. I’m 19 and have chosen not to go to college and to instead pursue flight school and venture into the outdoor industry. I’ve spent the majority of the past year escaping my doubts about not going down the “normal” path for most kids my age by traveling the world, climbing my arms off, and working full-time as a waitress.

The past month (since the beginning of November), life has finally forced me to sit down and think. I am trying to find the beauty in solitude, as both my parents whom I still live with work full time as do almost all of my friends who are not in university somewhere, and yet everything I do bores me. Knitting hats bores me, listening to podcasts bores me, reading bores me. I’ve been trying to sleep the days away, knowing that once I am able to start at least walking again, things will get better. During all this time that I have had to wallow in self-pity and discouragement, I wonder how different my life is from those around me who are my age. Most of my friends are in their mid-to-late twenties, and they all tell me that they only wish they would have been as ambitious as I am when they were my age.

But I can’t help but wonder, is it a problem that I cannot imagine my life ever slowing down? My physical therapist told me that if I had messed up my knee so badly when I was a bit older—say, 24 or so—then I might not have had to get it fixed, considering I would be less active. I laughed and told her that my life was only going to get more go-go-go-go and active from here on out. My question is, I guess, I feel as though it is difficult for me to find joy in any capacity in having a simple life, and knowing that the life in which I have planned to live is not going to be sustainable forever, how will I manage to prepare myself for the mental battle that will come when life forces me to slow down? Whether it be oodles of sports injuries, needing to find a job that pays better than those rooted in the outdoor industry, or being too tired to keep going, I cannot help but be worried about what my future holds, no matter how excited I am about it.

—Struggling in Solitude

Dear Struggling,

Sometimes it can feel easier to worry about what will go wrong in five years than to grapple with the present. You’re worried about your life slowing down in the future, but the fact is that your life has slowed down right now, and it deeply sucks. You went from skiing and climbing all the time, and being on your feet waiting tables, to not even being able to walk. That is a huge, difficult change. I have a desk job and am about 20 percent as active as you, and I would be absolutely crawling out of my skin in this situation and probably a little bit depressed. Self-pitying, and feeling discouraged, sounds about right.

What you are experiencing, though, is temporary. You will not always be lying on the couch recovering from this injury; you will return to doing activities. (And in all likelihood, at 24 you will have a mix of problems that are mostly things that you could not have even anticipated at 19.) The best thing you can do for your future self is to take care of the you that exists right now.

If you haven’t checked in with a therapist, that might be a good idea. At least find a person or two in your life whom you can be really honest with about how bored you are right now, not so that they can fix it but so that you can feel just a little more seen. Try meditating every day for a week. It might do nothing, or it might surprise you. I’m also curious if there are any activities you find boring but basically fine … I think part of the reason that so many bland TV shows are popular (Friends, The Bachelor, the sport of football) is that they can serve to ferry us from one side of a hard time to the other. Lower the bar. It’s OK to spend a lot of time doing things that aren’t super interesting right now, even if it’s also painful.

But also: dream. Order guidebooks to far-flung places you’d like to visit. Watch YouTube videos on tying knots, patching rafts, and landing planes. Make a Google Doc full of certifications you’d like to get to boost your résumé as an outdoorsperson or brainstorm lucrative side jobs you could get to help you make money to fuel your adventures. (Giving billionaires and their cats walking tours of your neighborhood? Anything is fair in brainstorming.) Refresh the Outward Bound careers page every day. Remind yourself that you will get through this period, and then you will go explore the world. Things are boring now. That’s OK. There is so much excitement in your future.

I’m a 17-year-old about to head to college in the fall (I’m ahead a year). College and the things surrounding it have been a major stress in the last few months, but of course I know that’s a normal experience. As an only child, I understand that my mom is being extremely protective and is overall in my business. She wanted to know the score of my placement test, the contacts, and my class options. When it came time to select a major, I expressed interest in LGBT+ studies. This was met by a harsh and strong reaction from her …