Fall recedes and winter is approaching fast. There’s a beauty in winter, but there’s also cold and darkness and it’s not a time one needs to enter already thinking dark thoughts and holding on to guilt. So, alas for anyone reading this, I feel the need of some confession and apology. I apologize for that in advance.

I’m often every bit as self-centered as I appear to be, so for every time I’ve been too wrapped up in my own problems to notice someone else’s pain, I apologize. Whoever you are or were, you deserved better.

For every time I’ve failed to resist the urge to “mansplain” something just because I wanted to talk about a subject that interested me, I apologize. Conversation is not a monologue. It’s rude and worse, boring. I will break that habit.

I realized from my earliest years that being a guy gave me advantages over my sisters. While I wasn’t treated better, I was treated differently, and those differences gave me freedom of action and privileges that my sisters did not have. I was too much a part of it at the time to see it as a problem, but I do now. I apologize for being so slow.

Most of all, for every time I just did not listen, I am truly sorry.