I just read a comment about me where someone said I "host a party in France". I don't - I help out a bit and attend it, but I don't host it.
This is an example of the constant mild inaccuracy I see when people talk about me and my life online. Usually it's not significant, but-
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it's said with confidence. The commenter didn't say "I think" or "I heard", they simply said "she hosts it." This is how most people talk about me (and probably other people they don't now personally), and it's kind of disorienting. How and why do they have that confidence?
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I have a general sense of my identity separating from me; there's a new character, existing like a phantom in the collective minds of people who see snippets about me on the internet. I don't have a lot of control over this character, and it's strange it's associated with me.
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Usually these misconceptions are mild, but sometimes people do the psychoanalyzing thing - they claim (again, confidently), that they know my motivations for things, they can trace the cause of my actions from my history, they can read my body language to understand-
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me better than I know myself. This is a bit annoying, because I know it's not something I can easily correct for them. I serve to reinforce the narratives they have about the world, and any attempt to say "actually no" will be rewritten into simply reinforcing what they believe.
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