Hey everyone, it’s Tina. Welcome back to another installment of Stories from Tina, where we take the messy, chaotic, and sometimes downright exhausting parts of life and try to make a little sense of them—usually with a strong cup of coffee in hand.
Today, we need to have a little chat. Grab a seat, because I want to talk about something that took me entirely too long to figure out: the exhausting, unpaid, full-time job of trying to manage what other people think of you.
If I had a dollar for every time someone twisted my words, misunderstood my intentions, or cast me as the villain in their own personal soap opera, I wouldn’t be writing this from my couch right now. I’d be writing it from a yacht in the Mediterranean, being fanned with palm fronds.
But recently, I stumbled upon a mindset shift. A mantra, really. It goes like this:
“Just let them. Let them lie if that’s what they gotta do to sleep peacefully at night. Let them play victim if that’s how they gotta avoid the truth. Let them twist the story and talk their noise.”
When I first read that, I felt like someone had literally knocked the wind out of me—in the best way possible. Because let’s be real, how many of us have spent hours crafting the perfect, five-paragraph text message in our Notes app, trying to defend our character? How many of us have lost sleep because so-and-so is spreading a narrative that is entirely fictional?
Human beings are wired for connection, which means we are naturally wired to want to be understood. When someone misrepresents us, our immediate reflex is to go into full Crisis PR Manager mode. We want to hold a press conference. We want to pull out the metaphorical receipts, set up a PowerPoint presentation, and prove to the jury why we are right and they are wrong.
But here is the hilarious, frustrating truth about people who are committed to misunderstanding you: People only see life from where they are standing anyway. If someone is standing in a place of insecurity, jealousy, or unresolved baggage, the lens they view you through is already smudged. You could bake them a cake, rescue a kitten from a tree, and pay off their mortgage, and they would still find a way to tell the neighborhood that your cake was dry and you were just showing off.
So, how do we actually put this into practice when our blood is boiling? Here is how I’ve started applying the “Let Them” theory to my everyday life:
• The Delusion Blanket: When someone lies about me to make themselves look better, I just picture them tucking themselves into bed at night under a giant, heavy blanket of delusion. Let them lie if that’s what they gotta do to sleep peacefully. If making me the bad guy is the only way they can get some shut-eye, well, sweet dreams, sweetheart.
• Retiring as the Explainer-in-Chief: You don’t owe nobody nothing nor an explanation. You don’t gotta prove nothing. Read that again. Print it out. Put it on your fridge. The moment you start over-explaining your boundaries, your choices, or your character, you are handing them the microphone. Drop the mic and walk off the stage.
• The Open Door Policy: Let them judge, let them leave. Sometimes the trash takes itself out, folks. If someone wants to judge you based on half-truths and exit your life, hold the door open for them. Heck, call them an Uber.
My absolute favorite part of this whole philosophy is the realization that you literally don’t have to lift a finger to win the long game.
Time always exposes what’s real without you saying a single word. Have you ever noticed that people who constantly spin narratives and play the victim eventually run out of people to play their games with? The noise always quiets down. And when the dust settles, they are left with the one person they’ve been trying to run away from: themselves.
Those battles are not yours. Your battle is protecting your peace, your energy, and your time.
The moment you stop giving people your power, you take it back for yourself. It’s like canceling a subscription you forgot you were paying for. Suddenly, you have all this extra emotional currency back in your account.
So, the next time you hear that someone is talking noise, twisting the story, or playing the victim at your expense, take a deep breath. Smile. Make yourself a nice cup of tea. And just… let them.
You’ve got better things to do than manage someone else’s fiction.
Until next time,
Tina