People are going to talk about you, behind your back, online, anywhere they get a chance to spread drama, especially if they view you as having any type of success in life. People are insecure, they’re miserable in their daily lives and they want you to join them in their misery. You can’t let their opinion of you affect how you see yourself and therein lies the great challenge of the everyday human.
The antidote to their attempts to control you through malicious speech is being unapologetically you. We all make mistakes and hurt people we didn’t intend to and in some cases, we had full intent to hurt. The antidote to their schoolyard gossiping behavior is owning your truth. They’ll say, “So and so said this and you said xyz,” so you respond by saying, “I said what I said.” Make no apologies unless you hurt someone unintentionally, but first ask yourself if it was truly unintentional, or if you said it to spur them to some sort of action, if that’s the case, see statement #1 – Make no apologies.
You see, you don’t need them to “like” you, if they’re your people they will like you organically, there will be no need to manipulate feelings. Having said that, manipulating someone to like you is only going to hurt you in the end, because when you are manipulating or maneuvering a faux relationship, you are not being true to who you are with them or yourself and eventually that fact will reveal itself and the relationship will likely end painfully, and in short order. Be who you are, live out loud as yourself instead of playing the roles society is trying to box you into.
There are a lot of things in my past that could come back to haunt me had I not made peace with myself about them, had I not seen them as growth opportunities and treated them instead as tragedies and played the victim. You see you can be victimized by someone, and it can be life altering in many ways, but ultimately you get to choose if the trauma of “them” gets to live rent free in your head and control your thoughts and movements through life. Or you can get up one morning and make the decision to refuse to be a victim ever again and send that person on their way back to the hell of their own making. Maybe I’m just cut from different cloth, I don’t like being a victim because I like living under my own power, so I tend to take my power back and not play the role of victim for life.
So, to my wee petty, little detractors who are always trying to sew seeds of discord in my life, I don’t have anything to hide, I said what I said, and if you’re mad at me about it, I probably feel you deserved it. Move along, nothing to see here, post whatever you want, tell whomever you want to tell. I’m absolutely positive that I tried to treat you like I treat everyone else, I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, I never went out of my way to offend, so if you’re offended, you may need to look inward. I never start a conversation with offense, it doesn’t matter what you look like, how you sound, or even if you smell, I won’t start a conversation that way, so if I removed you from my life, it’s for good reason. I’m not embarrassed about my past, everybody has one, everyone has made mistakes, said stupid things, hurt people they had no intention of hurting and I have as well, but the difference between you and I, is I learn from my mistakes and don’t allow the past to control my future.
Free yourself,
Tay