When the public (social media) idea of you is something completely fictional…

“Oh, but you’re not selfish at all!” a fan who has finally met you finds. While it’s nice to be nicer than expected, it’s hardly fun to have good people avoid your company because they believe nobody would LIE about a person and give them a bad reputation or put them in a bad light if they didn’t deserve it.

Some people like to give you a bad reputation so that new people would not have too high an expectation of you, so you can easily be nicer than expected. Others feel they really don’t need that favor, considering they are always impeccable in their behavior, and it is a burden to try and constantly prove oneself again and again to every new person in their lives.

There are people who do not believe in nice people at all, so they try to play detective, trying to figure out what nice people are REALLY LIKE. All THEY want to know is that NOBODY is nicer and more virtuous than they, themselves, are. Otherwise, they might have to start being a better person themselves.

There are those who just don’t want to tell you just how much they admire you at the first meeting because they know everybody admires you already, and you don’t want to be just another voice in that particular choir but want to leave an impression:

There are those who want to align themselves with you and use whatever little connection they have with you as their own personal ticket to imagined importance. “Oh, I know Iggy Pop quite well. We went to school together.” (Never spoke.) Then, they try to turn the admiration from Iggy to themselves: “Oh, you know, tho, he was a bit of a prick to me. I don’t think he ever spoke one word to me, really – was a bit too important for the little people, right?” (If you know Iggy’s history, you know how that doesn’t align, considering Iggy is not a psychic (to my knowledge), but that’s just the point. These people are not talking about that person or their real history but whatever emotion they want to stir up in you.)

Then, there are those people who test you by directly attacking you and those who want your attention thinking if you keep staring at them for long enough, you’ll fall in love with them.

People who raise the expectations or the bar too high for the liking of a loser are going to have their character attacked, it’s just a question of what is the attacker’s and accuser’s end goal in any given case.

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