Let them be wrong about you

I’ve been wanting to share this for some time now and today feels like the perfect day. A friend shared a post with me over the weekend. It was something hurtful, something being said about me in an online group that I’m not a member of. I know she shared it with the best of intentions, but as I was previously unaware of what had been said, I would have honestly been happier to remain in ignorance.

Of course, the emotionally mature thing would have been to just let it lie, but of course I couldn’t. Like picking at a scab I had to go looking for what other people were saying about me or my work elsewhere and of course I found them. This was on Twitter (no surprise there) and I found several threads that were wrong, rude and some were outright defamatory.

I started to type out a lengthy rebuttal. Pointing out to my followers, who I’m sure would have leapt to my defence, all the reasons that these people were wrong about me.

But then I had a thought, I deleted my lengthy thread and closed the app.

This quote from Lucy Sheridan came back to me in the nick of time and it really struck a chord.

Lucy - author of the Comparison Cure - said it in one of her online workshops last year (or possibly the year before - time is a blur). Talking about the need we often have to jump in and justify ourselves or our actions when faced with criticism. When of course the alternative is…not to do that.

In that moment, I had a choice. I could jump in with a lengthy post all about how wrong these few people were, and why. Those who followed me would undoubtedly have reacted on my behalf, they might have shared it with their friends and the post would have spread - magnified by Twitter’s outrage-magnifying algorithm. It would have dragged in other people and created the kind of drama that social media so often thrives on.

The other choice was simply to do nothing. Walk away. Not to react or to feed the drama machine.

I realised that I had nothing to prove. Those who knew me, knew my work or had followed me for a long time knew that I always tried to act from a place of integrity and in line with my beliefs and ethics.

Those who didn’t know me? Well, if they were the kind of people who would be swayed by a few spiteful words shared by a stranger online, then they would be unlikely to react positively to anything I said. And would I even want to expend the energy on trying to convince them? What purpose would it serve?

It’s not often we have a real lightbulb moment, something that feels like a real moment of personal growth. But for me, in that moment closing my laptop and going to sit in the garden for a few minutes felt like such an important step for me.

At the time it felt like a really difficult thing to do. But after half an hour, after a walk and a bit of time I felt fine. At peace. Ready to move on. Had I chosen to react I would undoubtedly not have been feeling that, but instead I would have been caught up in drama and counter-drama.

On balance I think I know how I’d rather spend my precious Sunday afternoon.