1:30pm July 4, 2015

“Just think about the one thing in your life that you did where you go, “Man I’m so glad nobody knows nothin’ about that.” You know what I mean? And then think of a whole bunch of ‘em. Now let’s condense it down into a 2-hour special and run it on CNN for about six months. Let’s see how we all hold up, you know?”

—

Rodney Carrington, Laughter’s Good

Seriously. Whether it’s CNN, or the Internet, or small-town gossip, it sucks donkey balls.

And the people who thrive on the gossip, love to make it sound like you’re somehow different, like whatever they found on you is not only horrible (even if it’s completely innocuous and not at all scandalous in reality) but uniquely horrible, as if there’s a single person on the planet who couldn’t be taken down by this stuff, because everyone has done shit they’re not proud of, or that looks really bad even if it isn’t actually really bad, or both. It’s just that some of us get privacy and some don’t.

That’s literally the only difference between me and any other person – other people got privacy, I didn’t, other people got to tell their own stories for themselves without other people twisting it into something it wasn’t, and I didn’t. That’s all. Presence or absence of cyberbullies and gossips and (sometimes) fame or notoriety, is the only difference between those of us who get privacy and dignity and those of us who don’t.

Which is why I try hard to make my blog a gossip-free zone. I don’t always succeed, but I at least try.