I’m Really Sorry to Bother You
I’m Really Sorry to Bother You
The Draft
Rachel had written the message so many times that she could no longer remember when she first started it.
The wording changed. Entire paragraphs appeared and disappeared. Some versions survived for days before being deleted, whilst others lasted only a few minutes. Yet regardless of how often she rewrote it, the opening sentence almost always remained the same.
“I’m really sorry to bother you.”
Rachel would stare at the words for a while before deleting them.
Occasionally she tried replacing them with something less apologetic. The alternatives never lasted long. Before long she would find herself returning to the same sentence, as though it belonged there. The strange thing was that Rachel wasn’t entirely sure what she was trying to say after it.
At twenty-nine years old, she lived alone in a small rented flat and worked in customer services for a pet insurance company. Most people would probably have described her as quiet but friendly. She had a small circle of friends, although only one she would describe as truly close. Her life was neither particularly exciting nor especially difficult. She paid her bills on time, remembered birthdays and rarely gave anyone cause for concern. Yet for several years she had been carrying something she struggled to explain, even to herself.
Rachel had spent a long time trying to find the right word for it. Sometimes she wondered whether it was a question, although that never seemed quite right. Questions implied that answers existed somewhere. At other times she thought of it as a problem, but that felt too dramatic for something she could barely describe. Whatever it was, it seemed to exist just beyond the reach of language. Every now and then she would catch sight of it indirectly, usually through a memory, a feeling or an unexpected thought, only for it to disappear the moment she tried to examine it more closely.
Perhaps that was why the message remained unfinished. It was difficult to explain something when she wasn’t entirely certain what she was trying to explain. The difficulty was not simply fear of another person’s response. More troubling was the possibility that she herself did not yet understand what she was attempting to say. On some evenings she would open the draft and stare at it for several minutes. The cursor blinked patiently beneath the first sentence. She would type a few more words, delete them, and then place her phone face down on the table and try to think about something else. A few days later she would find herself opening the message again.
The words remained unfinished, not because Rachel had something she desperately needed to hide, but because she had begun to suspect there was something important about herself that she had never quite learned how to think about.
The Couple Below
Rachel lived on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. The flat suited her well enough. It was small, affordable and close to work. The couple who lived in the flat below had been there longer than she had. Over time they had become familiar in the way neighbours often do. They exchanged greetings on the stairs, accepted parcels for one another and occasionally spoke about nothing more significant than the weather.
There was nothing remarkable about them. They went to work, argued about whose turn it was to take the bins out and spent far too much time trying to coax an ageing Labrador into the garden. Their lives seemed ordinary in the most reassuring sense of the word. Rachel occasionally found herself thinking about them after visiting her parents.
The comments were rarely directed at anyone in particular. They simply appeared as part of conversation. An actor on television. Somebody mentioned in the news. A neighbour a few streets away. Her father might describe someone as “a bit funny” whilst her mother nodded in agreement. Her brother-in-law was usually less restrained, often making remarks that caused Rachel to feel quietly uncomfortable, although nobody else at the table seemed especially troubled by them.
What struck Rachel was not the comments themselves but the certainty with which they were spoken. There was never any suggestion that another perspective might exist. Certain things simply were what they were. Rachel never challenged any of it.
The truth was that she wasn’t entirely sure why the conversations lingered in her mind afterwards. Sitting at her parents’ dining table, she usually said very little. The discussions moved on. Somebody changed the subject. Lunch was served. Life continued exactly as it always had.
Yet later, back in her flat, she would sometimes find herself looking out of the kitchen window towards the small shared garden below and thinking about the couple downstairs. Not because she had reached any particular conclusion, but because she was becoming increasingly aware that certain moments seemed to stay with her longer than others.
Her closest friend often came to mind in much the same way. The two of them still messaged most days, although they saw one another less frequently since the move. Rachel trusted them more than anyone else in her life. Over the years she had watched them navigate countless conversations about identity, family and belonging. None of it had appeared easy. There had been misunderstandings, arguments and periods of distance. Yet somehow they had continued moving forward, carrying a degree of self-understanding that Rachel quietly admired.
She had never told them about the message.
The Image
There were certain memories Rachel had never entirely understood. They surfaced occasionally without warning, often whilst she was doing something completely ordinary. Waiting for the kettle to boil. Walking home from work. Folding washing whilst the television played quietly in the background. The memories themselves were rarely significant. What puzzled Rachel was the fact that she still remembered them at all.
One of them dated back to her early teens.
She could no longer remember where she had first seen the image. It may have been in a magazine. It may have been somewhere online. The details had become blurred over time. What remained clear was the image itself. It was a photograph of a woman. Nothing unusual. Perhaps a little provocative. Yet for reasons Rachel could never adequately explain, she found herself returning to it repeatedly. At the time, she gave very little thought to why. She simply liked looking at it.
Years later, she could still picture the woman’s face with surprising clarity, despite having forgotten countless other things that should probably have mattered far more. Teachers’ names had disappeared. School friends had faded from memory. Entire holidays had become indistinct. Yet the image remained.
There were other memories like that. A conversation with a girl at school that she remembered more vividly than she felt she should. A passing comment made years ago that still returned to her unexpectedly. Small moments that seemed to leave a deeper impression than the situations themselves could possibly justify. Rachel had never managed to make much sense of any of it. Whenever such memories surfaced, she usually dismissed them. People remembered strange things all the time. The mind was full of odd connections and forgotten fragments. There was no particular reason why these memories should mean anything more than countless others. And yet they seemed oddly resistant to being forgotten.
What unsettled Rachel was not the memories themselves but the growing awareness that they seemed connected to something she could not quite see. They felt less like separate recollections and more like pieces of a puzzle whose overall picture remained frustratingly out of view. Perhaps that was why she found herself returning to the unfinished message. Not because she had discovered an answer, but because she was beginning to suspect that the question had been with her for much longer than she had realised.
The Cost of a Conversation
The job before the pet insurance company had been unremarkable in most respects. Rachel worked with people she generally liked, the work itself was manageable and there had never been any reason to believe she would leave. Looking back, she sometimes struggled to identify exactly when things began to feel different.
The incident itself seemed small at the time.
One afternoon, a colleague made a remark about somebody who was openly gay. Several people laughed. The conversation moved on. Rachel said nothing and, for a while, assumed she would forget about it like everyone else appeared to. Instead, she found herself thinking about it for days.
The comment returned to her at odd moments. Sitting on the bus home. Making dinner. Lying awake at night. Eventually, after far more deliberation than the situation probably warranted, she approached her manager privately. Even then, Rachel found it difficult to explain exactly why the remark had unsettled her. She wasn’t demanding action. She wasn’t making a complaint. She simply wanted to talk about something that had left her feeling uncomfortable in a way she didn’t fully understand. The manager listened carefully and thanked her for raising it and Rachel left the conversation feeling relieved.
That feeling didn’t last.
At some point afterwards, the manager spoke to the colleague involved. Rachel never witnessed the conversation and was never told exactly what had been said. The details remained entirely out of her view. Yet something seemed to shift. Whether the change was real or imagined, Rachel could never be certain. There were no obvious confrontations. Nobody said anything directly to her. Work continued much as it always had. Yet she found herself increasingly aware of the people around her.
A conversation that stopped as she entered the room. A glance she couldn’t quite interpret. The uncomfortable feeling that something had changed without her knowledge. The uncertainty proved strangely difficult to live with. Rachel found herself wondering what had been said, who knew what and whether she had revealed more about herself than she had intended. The questions followed her through the working day and accompanied her long after she left the office.
Several months later, an opportunity arose at a pet insurance company. The salary was better, the location more convenient and the role offered a fresh start. Rachel accepted the position without much hesitation. The decision seemed to make sense for all sorts of practical reasons. Even so, there were moments when she wondered whether she had been leaving something else behind as well.
The Subtle Invitation
Several months before the message became a permanent fixture on her phone, Rachel had been ordering a repeat prescription through her GP surgery’s online portal. The task itself took less than a minute. She was about to log out when a section advertising local support services caught her attention. She almost ignored it.
There was no particular reason to click. Yet something about the page caught her attention in a way she couldn’t quite explain. Over the following weeks, she found herself returning to it from time to time. Most of the information meant very little to her. Some websites were opened and forgotten within minutes. Others seemed to hold her attention for reasons she could not quite explain.
One evening she found herself reading an article written by a counsellor. The details of the article would later become difficult to remember. What stayed with her was the curious feeling that somebody had managed to describe an experience without describing her life at all. Nothing on the page matched her circumstances, yet parts of it felt strangely familiar. The experience was unsettling.
Rachel had always assumed that people sought counselling when something was clearly wrong. What surprised her was the number of counsellors who wrote about uncertainty itself. Several described people arriving with questions they could not yet formulate and feelings they did not fully understand. Rachel found herself returning to those descriptions more often than she cared to admit.
She returned to the website several times over the following days. Eventually she reached the bottom of the page and noticed an email address. It was unremarkable. Just a name and a brief invitation to get in touch. Rachel looked at it for a few moments before copying it into her phone. She wasn’t planning to write anything. At least that was what she told herself. The following evening she opened a blank email and entered the address. The screen remained empty for several minutes. Eventually she typed a single sentence.
“I’m really sorry to bother you.”
Then she stopped.
Looking back, Rachel sometimes thought that was the moment everything began. Not because she had finally found the words she was searching for. But because it was the first time she had allowed herself to imagine that another person might help her find them.
Sensing Before Understanding
Looking at Rachel’s story, it would be easy to assume that she was avoiding an answer she already knew. That interpretation is tempting because it offers certainty. It allows us to imagine that the unfinished email, the memories and the questions all point towards a conclusion that Rachel has simply been unwilling to accept.
Yet I am not convinced that is what was happening.
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas described something he called the “unthought known.” He used this phrase to describe aspects of our experience that are known emotionally long before they are understood consciously. Rather than existing as fully formed thoughts, they exist as feelings, impressions, attractions, discomforts and recurring experiences that seem significant without revealing exactly why. In many ways, Rachel’s difficulty was not that she possessed a secret. It was that she lacked a story capable of making sense of what she had been experiencing.
The image she remembered from her early teens did not explain anything on its own. Neither did the conversations that stayed with her longer than expected, the comments made around her parents’ dining table, her admiration for her friend or the discomfort she experienced at work. Taken separately, each experience appeared ordinary enough. Yet together they seemed to circle around something that remained difficult to see directly.
Bollas believed that people often live with this kind of knowledge for years. We sense patterns before we understand them. We are drawn towards certain experiences without knowing why. Sometimes we find ourselves repeatedly returning to the same questions, memories or relationships without fully grasping what they might be trying to tell us. From this perspective, Rachel’s unfinished email begins to look rather different.
The problem was not that she knew exactly what she wanted to say and lacked the courage to say it. If anything, the opposite may have been true. She was attempting to find words for something that had never previously existed in words at all. That distinction matters. Many of the most important things we come to understand about ourselves do not arrive as sudden revelations. More often they emerge gradually through reflection, conversation and relationship. What begins as a vague feeling slowly acquires shape. What initially feels confusing becomes easier to recognise. Experiences that once appeared disconnected begin to form a pattern. Seen in this way, the email was significant not because of what it contained but because of what it represented.
For the first time, Rachel had allowed for the possibility that understanding might not be something she had to achieve entirely on her own. The sentence she wrote was tentative. Apologetic, even.
“I’m really sorry to bother you.”
Yet beneath the apology sat something quietly important.
A willingness to begin.
The Possibility
Rachel’s story does not end with certainty. Perhaps she eventually sent the email. Perhaps she didn’t. In some ways, that question feels less important than it once did.
I imagine her sitting in front of a screen late one evening. The email remains open. The message is longer now than it was when she first wrote it. There are sentences where once there was only an apology. Thoughts that felt impossible to express have gradually begun to find their way into words.
Her hand rests lightly on the mouse.
The arrow hovers over the send button.
For the first time, she is not searching for the perfect explanation. She is simply considering the possibility of allowing another person to hear what she has been carrying alone.
Whether she presses send is something only Rachel knows.
About Therapy with Alexis
Rachel’s story is fictional, but the experience it describes is not uncommon. Many people arrive in therapy carrying questions, uncertainties or experiences they cannot yet fully explain. They may have questions without answers, feelings without clear origins or experiences that seem significant without fully understanding why.
Psychodynamic counselling provides a space to explore these experiences at your own pace. Rather than seeking immediate solutions, it encourages curiosity about thoughts, feelings, memories and patterns that may have remained difficult to understand alone. Often, the most important discoveries emerge gradually through reflection and conversation.
If you would like to learn more about psychodynamic counselling and how I work, you can explore the pages on this website, including my introduction to psychodynamic therapy.
I offer individual psychodynamic counselling both online and in person. New clients are welcome to arrange a free 30-minute initial assessment, providing an opportunity to discuss what brings you to therapy and whether psychodynamic counselling feels like the right fit for you.
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