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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Now comes the really tough part:
Recognizing that you yourself have very likely done this to others in the past, & despite your attempts to curb it, are still occasionally guilty of it.
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Yes, absolutely. After this has been happening to me I've become hyper aware of this happening to other people, as well as times where I've developed strong opinions about people I didn't know.
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To be fair, other people do "know you" in a way that you can't ever know yourself.
Our conscious awareness is a pretty random thing, making stuff up all the time.
Not that our internal model of ourselves is "wrong", it's just very biased.
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Even this assumes you both define "host" the same way. E.g., I've found some people use host to mean that you're involved with it, or are the face of the event to them, etc. All disclaimers apply - I don't know the context for this particular situation, but we're generalizing.