Rumors and Dubious Favors

Anyone who gives enough of a fuck to make shit up about you is pouring their energy into your cup. In that sense, I can appreciate what’s going around the sosyete rumor mill about me this time. My cup runneth over, though I wish someone else was drinking it.

I found out last night about the newest batch. I think my initial response was horror and disgust, but I’ve moved on to humor because there’s not much else you can do.

This has been a running theme in my experience of this incarnation. I have several funny-in-retrospect memories of reading a book on the couch at home, grounded for months at a time for my sass, and hearing people calling my mother to swear—swear—that I was currently peddling ass on the main street of my town. If memory serves, I was thirteen at the time, and still furtively looking up the words people were using in dictionaries and pondering why grown ass adults were so uniformly interested in the sex life I didn’t have.

The answer, if you’re interested, is small town, deep US South Christianity, but any of the religions of the book and good old human nature will do the same.

I know who started these rumors. I also know what motivated them, because people are not as quiet as they think they are, and I spend a fair amount of time sitting quietly doing things, in this case painting a statue of my wife to seal, bless, and put in the rose bushes I planted for her and the other metressa of this house last year.

If you’re going to get higher than giraffe pussy and talk shit, you should probably not do it in the same house as the person you’re smearing.

I think this is a great opportunity to say a few things about people.

The first thing I want to say is that truly, there’s no point in getting angry about it. Not only do people not listen (in general), but they really don’t listen if they’re having feelings about something. There’s not a thing you can say to persuade someone who has decided you are their enemy, and people tend to make each other worse—they lather up en masse about something, and the more they interact, the less what happened matters to them enough to ask questions.

Second, most of what people say is a reflection on them. Just as the small town rumors that I was slinging ass as a child were all about the way those adults were thinking about me, the willingness to call my mother and carry tales, with what I have no doubt was exaggeration, has a lot more to do with the mindset of those adults than anything I was up to.

Third, and I think this is probably the obvious next thing to say, but the things people say are worthless. Hell, this post is equally useless, but I am salving the mild hurt I feel about the whole thing (because whaaaaaattttttttt the fuck), so I suppose this counts as a little self-soothing, but talk comes, talk goes, and people can’t remember what they said an hour ago, let alone follow some sort of coherent through line with their words.

And last—hell, nobody promised this would be an easy life. From time to time, someone’s just gotta try you for whatever reason they do. I am not yet a mambo, but I was a dominatrix, and I have plenty of experience with people projecting things onto me for various reasons.

I am still here, and I can say without antipathy, that if someone does project, I can recognize it. Past it, I can recognize that they are blindly lashing out, and I don’t have to take any of it personally.

If you’re following along at home, the ability to let that go is an act of will, the will I have because of the work I’ve done on myself, and it’s one of the reasons priests don’t abuse their authority.

Here I am, still, watching the rumor mill grind away at someone’s projection of me.

Ayibobo my loves.