I ended the last rant with a question I couldn’t shake.
Why am I working so hard to be understood by somebody whose opinion I don’t even respect?
I’ve been sitting with that one. And the answer made me uncomfortable.
Because it’s not about approval. I meant what I said. I don’t want their friendship. I don’t want their respect. I don’t need them to like me.
But I still needed them to stop being wrong about me.
Why?
I think there’s a few different things going on, and they all look the same from the outside.
Sometimes you want somebody to think good of you. That’s approval. Simple.
Sometimes you just want the facts straight. Somebody got it twisted and you want to correct it. That’s about accuracy. Also simple.
But then there’s this other thing. Where you don’t admire the person, you don’t value their opinion, you wouldn’t take advice from them about nothing — but you still can’t rest until they stop seeing you wrong.
That last one is the one I couldn’t let go of.
Because it means you can outgrow the need to be liked and still be stuck on the need to be seen right. You can stop chasing popularity and still lose sleep over somebody’s wrong idea of you. I don’t think those are the same hunger.
So where’s the line? When does defending yourself stop being about the truth and start being about control?
I think it comes down to what’s actually in your hands and what ain’t.
How you moved — that’s yours. Whether you were honest, whether you treated people right, whether you owned your part. Nobody can take that from you.
How you respond — that’s yours too. You can explain yourself. You can correct the record. You can set a boundary. You can walk away. Your call.
Whether somebody’s criticism is even worth your time — that’s yours. Just because somebody said something about you don’t mean you owe them an investigation. Anybody can make a claim. That don’t give them access to your self-examination.
But what they decide to believe? That ain’t yours. You can lay out the truth plain as day and somebody will still walk away thinking what they came in thinking. You can’t control what people do with information.
Whether they ever admit they were wrong? That ain’t yours either. Might happen next week. Might happen never.
And that feeling of closure you’re waiting on — hating to say it, but that ain’t fully yours. You can work toward peace, but you can’t force a situation to feel finished just because you’re tired of carrying it.
You can try to change somebody’s mind. Nothing wrong with that. That’s influence.
But influence ain’t authority. You can make your case. You can’t make them rule in your favor.
And that’s when I saw what I’d been doing.
There’s a moment — it’s quiet, you barely notice it happening — where you’re not defending the truth no more. You’re auditioning for the verdict.
It starts off honest. You’re setting the record straight. Saying what happened. Nothing wrong with that.
But then something shifts. You’re not trying to establish the truth anymore. You’re waiting on them to make it feel real by agreeing with you. You’re not finished when you’ve said your piece. You’re finished when they say you were right. And if they never say it, you’re never finished.
That’s the audition. You’re pleading your case to a judge who never agreed to hear it, waiting on a ruling nobody owed you.
The part that messed me up is I had this expectation I never even said out loud. If I know who I am, and I know what happened, then eventually they supposed to see it too. The truth should speak for itself. The evidence should settle it.
But nobody signed up for that. Nobody owes you their understanding. I’ve been acting like somebody’s late on a payment they never agreed to make.
And look — wanting to be understood don’t make you entitled to be understood. The truth don’t stop being true because somebody won’t acknowledge it. I had to sit with that one for a while.
You don’t have to act like their opinion don’t matter. You don’t have to forgive them. You don’t even have to pretend it don’t bother you. You just gotta stop making their agreement the thing your peace depends on.
So I’ll leave it where I landed, because I’m still working through it myself:
Are you trying to establish the truth, or are you waiting on somebody else to make it feel real by acknowledging it?
The first one, that’s on you.
The second one never was.
— Bo