One evening, people in my faculty were playing Anonymous. For anyone who doesn't know, it's a game where someone drops a link and people click on it to say whatever they think about you, without their name attached. That's the whole point of it, nobody gets to know who said what.

A lot of things were said. Most of it I scrolled past. But one message made me stop.   Someone wrote that a girl in my faculty is "so social" and then called her the public toilet of the faculty. What they meant, without saying it directly, is that she's been with too many people. That being friendly and open somehow makes her available to everyone.   Here's the thing though. This girl is not like that at all. She is just social. That's it. That's her whole crime. She talks to people, she's warm, she doesn't act like everyone around her is a stranger to be avoided. And for that, someone decided to call her a public toilet.  

Now flip it. This is something I've noticed a lot, not just from that thread. Someone quiet, someone who mostly keeps to himself and doesn't say much, gets called an "aura farmer". As if minding your business and not being loud is some kind of act. As if silence is suspicious now. People assume that because you aren't broadcasting every thought, you must be calculating something behind closed doors or acting too important for the room.  

So let's think about this for a second. The social one gets insulted for being social. The quiet one gets insulted for being quiet. Two people, doing the complete opposite of each other, and somehow both of them did something wrong.   That's when it clicked for me. This was never about what either of them did. If you talk, they'll say you talk too much. If you're quiet, they'll say you're proud, or fake, or hiding something. If you're generous, they'll say you're trying to buy people's love. If you keep to yourself, they'll say you're stingy or full of yourself. There is no version of you that avoids commentary. None.   People will always find something. That's not a maybe, that's just how it goes. You could live the most careful, most inoffensive life possible and someone would still find an angle to talk from. Because a lot of the time, it was never really about you. It's about them needing something to say, needing to feel like they noticed something, needing to feel superior for a second by picking someone apart.It's easier to label someone else than to sit quietly with your own insecurities.  

So if people are going to talk regardless of what you do, what's the point of shrinking yourself to avoid it? You can't dodge something that isn't actually aimed at your behavior in the first place. The girl being social wasn't the problem. The guy being quiet wasn't the problem. The problem was that some people will always need a target, and they'll adjust the accusation to fit whoever's in front of them.   So be you. Be social if that's who you are. Be quiet if that's who you are. Be loud, be soft, be whatever feels true to you, because the talking was never going to stop either way. At least this way, you're being talked about while actually living as yourself, instead of a smaller, edited version of yourself that people found something to say about anyway.   Let them talk. They were always going to.