The Making of a Good Rumor in Maniacs, Prophecy, and Old Friends

You know the feeling. You have removed from your life all but those you trust. Stopped confiding in people. Don’t even write your secrets down anymore. Then suddenly… The most horrible rumors start going around about you. You feel completely betrayed. Point a finger at the most likely candidate and punish them. But you might be surprised as to how the worst rumors begin. Usually I find it’s something like this:

A trusted friend or family member has a verbal exchange with you in public. Nothing unusual. A few inside jokes maybe or a reference to something that happened last week or a conversation you had sevral years ago. Innocent.

Someone overhears a piece of your conversation and misinterprets it. It seems concerning. They think they must do something to fix the situation, but they don’t feel comfortable talking to you about it.

They confide in a mutual friend or someone they feel is smart enough to know better what to do. This conversation is overheard is well and now everyone in ear shot believes it might be true! This new bit of information confirms in their head ‘facts’ about the previous conversation. They think themselves clever investigators. Flies on the wall.

The mutual friend then approaches you with this concern. You explain that it is not true and what the reference was about. To the flies on the wall it seems a likely excuse to bury the truth.

Flies whisper and whisper. Those that dislike you overhear and add their two cents about what they think. No lies. Just shitty opinions of you that now seem more true than they were before.

Suddenly everyone ia convinced of something that is completely untrue and your insistance that it’s not simply seem like a defense against people knowing “your secret”.

The worst rumors are made by your dearest friends. Your loving family. Yourself. If a person that dislikes you says bad things about you then nobody will believe them because it’s apparent that they are not friends of yours. Even if they are not trying to hurt you, if they are not closely associated with you then how would thwy know such things about you? Nobody believes your enemies. Not even your frenemies. But people often mishear, misread, and misunderstand.

The worst rumors are started by the best intentions.

Here are aome of the most riddiculous rumors that have been spread about me:

I was rumored to be cheating on my first fiance with one of my friends whom, they said I secretly had an arranged marriage with. They said we snuck off to the bathroom together to make out and that we are probably sleeping together too because he definatly spent the night at my house the last two nights and came to school wearing the same clothes for three days. Plus we seemed awefully close! That engagment ring I was wearing? They said he gave it to me but I lied and said it was my fiance. That explains why I stopped wearing it right around the time we got into a fight.

They said I had gotten pregnant by my fiance but my parents forced me to have an abortion. That’s ehy I was crying so much and acting so strangely lately.

They said I was selling deugs between classea and that I was the leader of a gang and if anyone said anything to me about it I’d kill them. After all, didn’t they say I was a psychopath!? I was definatly acting strangely.

They said alot of things about my strange behavior in high school, but ‘they’ never got to know me well enough to learn the truth:

I was suicidal.

And so many other things. The point is this: don’t ever believe anything about anyone unless they tell you themselves. Even then it might not be true. After all…

I said I was fine and nothing was wrong.

The Bible tells us how to handle issues we have with a fellow christian:

Step one: discuss it WITH THEM PRIVATELY.

If that doesn’t work…

Step Two: find a fellow believer to take with you to discuss the issue WITH THEM PRIVATELY!

If that doesn’t work…

Step Three: remove them from your life peacefully until the issue is resolved so that their actions cannot harm you further. And most importantly: PRAY FOR THEM.

Praying for your enemies is frequently the best way to solve a problem. Don’t believe me?

Try it.