31/12/2025
Thurs is so true
When People Talk About You Instead of to You. I SAY.... LET THEM, AND MOVE ON, BUT THIS IS A GOOD READ. 💙🌀🩵
There’s a kind of harm that doesn’t feel dramatic —
it feels disorienting.
You don’t get confronted.
You don’t get accused.
You don’t get a conversation.
You get distance.
A shift in tone.
A cooling you can’t explain.
The sense that something moved through the room
without ever passing through you.
And suddenly, you’re reacting to something
you were never part of.
This isn’t confusion.
It’s relational displacement.
When people talk about you instead of to you,
they aren’t communicating —
they’re relocating discomfort.
Something in you activated something in them:
envy, threat, guilt, exposure.
And instead of meeting it directly,
they moved it sideways.
Into implication.
Into “concern.”
Into story.
Jung would call this projection with witnesses —
because projection feels unstable unless it’s shared.
So they don’t just project onto you.
They recruit agreement.
“I’m worried about them.”
“They seem different lately.”
“I don’t know what it is, but something feels off.”
Nothing concrete.
Nothing you can respond to.
Just enough ambiguity
to shift how others see you.
And once that happens,
you’re no longer relating to people.
You’re relating to an atmosphere.
Here’s the part that hurts most:
You were removed from your own reality.
Judgements formed.
Distance justified.
Decisions made.
All without your presence.
That creates a specific wound —
not rejection,
but erasure.
And because there was no confrontation,
your mind turns inward.
Did I do something wrong?
Am I missing something?
Am I the problem?
That self-questioning isn’t weakness.
It’s what happens when meaning is withheld.
But here’s the stabilising truth:
People who can speak directly don’t need intermediaries.
Talking around you isn’t kindness.
It’s self-protection at your expense.
Often unconscious.
Still consequential.
And this is where your power returns:
You cannot explain your way out of a story
you were never invited into honestly.
Trying only keeps you off-balance.
So you stop chasing clarity
from people committed to ambiguity.
You stop organising your nervous system
around what might be circulating.
You let coherence speak for you.
Because if someone talks about you instead of to you,
they are showing you the limits of their capacity —
not the truth of your character.
You weren’t avoided because you were fragile.
You were avoided because directness
would have required self-confrontation.
And that was never your responsibility.
Let them talk.
Truth doesn’t rush.
It doesn’t argue.
It endures.
