it has gotten to a point where i almost feel hesitant to say something of any substance to anyone via text because i know that potentially a screenshot of my messages will immediately be sent to a group chat full of people i don’t know who will psychoanalyze me for hours lol

AN ADDENDUM:

just to be clear, this doesn’t apply to everyone, and definitely not people who are close to me. i would hope this is the same for you. i can just feel it when it’s happening is all, having felt it many times before. there is this air of “what is he trying to say here? he must be lying” even though anyone will tell you that for all my inane and obtuse wording, i am pretty straightforward when i say things! and so people will roll out the therapist couch and lay out a scarecrow they created in my image, and turn to their friends to interrogate and understand the human-shaped outline of thin air presented to them.

there is a strange thing i have noticed about people in all my time here on this godforsaken planet, and it is that often they will not take your word for it when you say exactly what you mean to say, and which you have said plainly and honestly. this applies to a lot of different conversations you have with a lot of different people you meet. when someone doesn’t take you at face value when you tell it straight, it means that either: 1) they assume everyone is always lying, 2) they themselves are always lying to everyone, or 3) they are always lying to themselves. the worst kind of person you can meet is someone who is all three. it’s like the fella says: if you can’t be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with anyone else? a fundamentally duplicitous person is a dangerous person, and you should avoid these people at all costs. what’s scary is that they probably don’t feel any way about anything at all. this is an unprincipled and empty person who just gets jacked on chaos. there is some significant human element missing inside them. and when this sort of person assumes you are bluffing when you call the thing what it is, it says way more about the way they come at the world than it does about how you do. you learn a lot watchin things eat, et cetera.

here is a good way to become relatively immune to psychoanalysis: when they try to figure you out, you can just say nothing, and then they seemingly unknowingly reveal everything about themselves when their goal was the opposite of that. and it is here in this no man’s land where you can feel truly afraid of what a person can be when there’s no guiding force steering them through time and space.

i have mentioned before that a few times a year i receive a handful of unsolicited emails from my friends’ boyfriends (or ex-boyfriends)⁠—the operative word being “unsolicited”. i don’t know why this keeps happening and i really wish these people would go away. it makes me kind of sad to think about how often it has happened to me. but these emails are always the same: this person is trying to probe me under the guise of Just Being Curious. they are looking for an angle of entry so they can cut my brain open and look inside. thing is, when met with absolute silence, these dudes become increasingly desperate, and then they say some pretty incriminating shit that definitely makes my friends who are dating them or did date them uncomfortable. it makes me uncomfortable too. the entitlement! it’s weird! they got no poker face. i don’t know if they’re stupid or what . . . but man i’m not trying to sleep with your freakin girlfriend. all you have done is passive aggressively implied this while at the same time spilled that you have massive insecurity issues. uh . . . oops.

what i’m trying to say is: come and get me, coppers!! you won’t get me. people are not complicated. if you want to assume anything about anyone you meet, in order to protect yourself, it is that they are motivated by something they want. once you figure out what they want, the whole cardboard city comes crumbling down. but if you tell the truth, or else are just totally silent, then you have done your due diligence.

i don’t ever assume people talk about me. i only think that when they give me reason to. thing is, i don’t care what people say about me in the dark. get real. i got a life. you can have one too as soon as you decide to. just: don’t make YOUR problem MY problem. leave me alone, ok??