I absolutely hate gossip. Anyone with me? I’ve always hated gossip or at least that’s what I thought. In truth, I hated the idea of gossip. I feared the label of “gossip.” But I guess I didn’t hate it too much because I was never one to walk away from an interesting story about someone else’s life. If I had a few facts of my own to pitch in, I never hesitated to add to the conversation. And while I didn’t have any malicious or negative intentions behind participating in these types of conversations, I perpetuated a habit that I didn’t particularly like about myself.
And then recently I found myself at the center of conversation–mostly among friends and acquaintances, but other times among people I barely knew. As word made its way back to me, I was entertained/horrified/crushed at the stories that were circulating about me and my personal life. Nothing makes you feel more stripped down than finding out people are talking about you without you being there to defend yourself. There were fragments of truth intermingled with fiction and voices of concern intertwined with judgment. And. It. Hurt. It was then that I realized how harmful gossip is even when it’s innocent and even when it’s unintentional.
I sincerely believe that most people who gossip don’t mean anything by it. Anyone who has ever felt convicted of gossiping would attest to that. But we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions, don’t we? Anyone else justify their gossip habit by telling yourself you’re just sharing a story? It seems to be a problem with women because we are naturally conversationalists, but with the social media epidemic, no gender, sinner or saint is safe from falling into it. I don’t enjoy talking about other people’s mistakes, downfalls and rumors—I really don’t. But I also struggle with small talk. And when I say struggle, I mean that I would rather talk to a complete stranger about the theory of evolution than run into someone I “kind of” know at the mall. Anyways, that’s an entirely different topic. Do you know what I do when I’m faced with small talk? I take the easy way out and talk about other people.
Gossip always starts off innocently; asking the other person if they’ve ran into (insert mutual friend name here) or if they saw (insert mutual social media follower here) just got engaged. As the conversation progresses, I end up walking away realizing that I just spent a great deal of time discussing someone else’s life, even if I don’t know them all that well. Let me say this clearly: we have to stop using gossip as a way to bond and connect with people. There is a much more genuine connection with people that could exist if we stopped relying on our safety net of talking about other people. As the quote goes: “a lot of problems in the world would go away if we talked to each other instead of about each other.”
Yes, there is a difference between sharing a story and gossiping. And I don’t believe that the difference lies in technicalities; technicalities we often resort to in order to rationalize our actions. For example, “well it’s a true story so it’s not gossip.” Nope. Not true, sorry friends. It can still be gossip even if it’s true. I’ve discovered that the difference lies in the matter of the heart also known as your intentions. You have to do a heart check to determine what your goal is from telling the story. Are you expressing genuine concern for a mutual friend? Or do you thrive on knowing and sharing insider details of the lives of others? Is it your story to tell? Did it happen to you or directly affect you?
Of course the names of people do come up naturally in day-to-day conversations. We are built for relationships and our lives are people-oriented. So how can you use discernment to determine when you’re one foot over the line when the line is blurred?
The first indication that you may be teetering along the lines of gossip is that twinge of guilt you feel. You know the one. The one where as soon as you start feeling it, you feel the need to voice (out loud) that you don’t mean to talk bad about so and so, but…or you slap on that prerequisite label, “I don’t want to say anything bad but…” The second indication you are about to fall into gossip is when you use words like “well apparently…”, “I heard that…”, “I guess that…”, “I don’t know the whole story, but…”.
The problem with gossip is that when we do it, we weave bits of our interpretation of truth into someone else’s story. We make it our story to tell, even if we don’t know facts or know the person. Suddenly our version of the truth is the truth. And then our version becomes someone else’s version that becomes someone else’s version and all along the way, new interpretations, details and opinions are woven into the story. Suddenly, we’ve just stamped judgment and the version of truth we’ve settled on onto someone else’s name.
In kindergarten, we used the THINK acronym and it absolutely applies to how we should go about our daily conversation:
T is it true?
H is it helpful?
I is it inspirational?
N is it necessary?
K is it kind?
We are all trying to stumble our way through life making infinite mistakes along the way–please, let’s give each other some grace and freedom to do that.