Gossip and accusation
An email list I’m on recently had a thread about gossip. All agreed that it was a bad thing, that we should all stop indulging in the guilty pleasure, and there were a couple of angst-ridden confessions, as per the regulations that govern these sort of things. It wasn’t until the end of the thread, when our resident wise voice of reason stepped in, that anyone tried to actually define gossip. It’s an issue for me because I do like to talk about people I know, and I love to hear about the dramas in their lives, but I’m not sure that what I do is gossip.
Is it gossip to talk about other people? Someone once said that if you talk about yourself, your self-centred, if you talk about others you’re a gossip, and if you talk about things you’re boring. Which leaves very little to talk about! (After all, if you talk about the other person, they appear the self-centered one.) Mister Wise Voice of Reason suggested that gossip is not the spreading of secrets or rumours, it’s the judgemental commentary.
I mostly talk about others with my grandmother. And yes, we do talk about people’s behaviours we find annoying, and we talk about ways we wish they’d change. But when I talk about my parents hoarding junk, for instance, I really don’t think I’m judging them. Oh, their habits annoy me, certainly. Their cluttered house drives me to distraction. But I’m not saying that they’re bad people, or that they should change how they live. I only say that I personally find it irritating. It’s my irritation.
And then I try to understand them, try to understand why they do what they do. That’s the valuable part of the conversation for me. Gaining insight and understanding. Often I’m not quite so irritated by people’s behaviour when I understand where it’s coming from. When it makes some sense.
I’m starting to seriously question, however, whether my grandmother gets into these conversations for the same reason I do. I have a bad memory for the train of a conversation – I can’t remember where it went or how it got there. So this is hard to analyse. But I’m getting a suspicion that what usually goes on in these conversations is that my grandmother brings up some failing of someone, I agree that it irritates me too, and then I go on to defend the person and try to explain the possible psychological reasons for their behaviour.
This usually gives me sufficient satisfaction from hearing the sound of my own voice to find the conversation rewarding, and do it again next week. I guess it feels like I’m teaching or something. But occasionally it gets nasty. What do you do if a judgmental person turns the topic of conversation to you? It happened again to me today, and I came away feeling horrible.
It all starts out sounding completely innocent, of course, like she’s just interested in me. Even when the accusation comes out, the language is heavily veiled. But I understand my perceived failings are that, firstly, I am still friends with my ex-husband, which surely means I am still in love with him and haven’t properly broken it off, since men and women can never be just friends. Secondly, I am apparently just pretending to be seriously ill, and should actually be working at least part-time, regardless of what any doctor says. The fact that I am not working is most likely because I am a lazy, irresponsible person who likes to sponge off others. Oh, and thirdly, my first boyfriend from when I was nineteen has turned out to be a rather sad and uninspiring character, which I think means that I am a bad person today, even though I am no longer in touch with him.
And yes, I started out defending my choice to have friendships with men, and I asked her why she isn’t working (at age eighty) if she considers it such an important part of life even for the frail and unwell. But in the end, all of that really just plays into her nasty little game, and you can’t win it.
And it is nasty. I’m right there. If she wants to know, say, whether I still have a romantic attachment to my ex, she can just ask. But to insist that I do is to make an accusation. She is basically calling me a liar. That’s gone way out of the bounds of "interested in my life" and into attack mode. My sister is aware of this propensity of my grandmother’s, and wisely stays a long way away. I wish I had the same sense.