The Slippery Slope of Drama
A man who minds his own business seldom makes the news. He goes to work. He comes home. He pays his bills and keeps his peace. There is nothing in that to feed people who hunger for noise. So they leave him alone—for a while. Then they grow bored, and they begin to talk.
Drama starts small. It nearly always does. A sentence cut in half. A look misread. A story told once, then told again with a little color added. Somewhere in town a woman says, “Did you hear about him?” The truth would be too flat to hold her listener, so she bends it. Bending feels harmless at first. It is not.
By the third or fourth telling, the man who kept to himself is no longer a quiet fellow who worked and went home. Now he is suspicious, strange, not quite right. They make him into something he never was. The lie gathers weight and speed the way a river gathers force on the way to the falls. It pulls in other small lies, other careless words, until it is something large and filthy and hard to stop.
People will tell you they spread these stories to protect others. They say they are only warning folks. That is one of the easier lies they tell themselves. Most of the time, they are only protecting their own boredom from silence. They are afraid of their own lives, their own emptiness. So they fill it with another man’s name.
There is a special meanness in going after a person who is minding his own business. It is not like meeting a man in the ring, face to face, fists up and rules clear. It is cutting his legs from under him while his back is turned. A man can brace himself for a punch he sees coming. He cannot brace for a story whispered in rooms he never enters.
The slope begins there. One lie told to feel important. Another told so you do not have to admit the first was wrong. A third told to cover the damage of the second. Soon you are not only talking about another man. You are defending the worst version of yourself. You dig your heels in, but the ground is slick with the harm you have done.
Drama feels like power in the beginning. You feel tall because you stand on someone else’s name. People look at you. They lean in to listen. You mistake their curiosity for respect. But it is not respect. They will leave you for the next loud voice as quickly as they came. The only thing that stays is what you did to your own soul.
I have seen friendships of twenty years go to dust in a week over lies that started as a joke. I have watched men sit alone in a small café here with a chipped mug and a crooked picture on the wall, because no one wants to be seen with the person the town decided to hate. And I have seen something worse: the faces of those who started it, hard and tight, still defending themselves long after the fun has gone out of it.
There is no clean way to play with mud. You cannot throw it and come away unstained. A village, a workplace, a small street, a family—these are fragile things. They live on trust. The moment you choose drama over truth, you take a knife to that trust. It may not bleed at once, but it is cut all the same.
The man who was minding his own business loses much when lies are told about him. He may lose friends, work, the easy way people once met his eyes. But the people who spin the lies lose something deeper. They lose the ability to website look at themselves without flinching. They know what they did, even if no one says their name aloud.
It is a poor trade: his reputation for your brief thrill. His peace for your passing feeling of importance. It never ends well. Either the truth comes out and you are seen as you are, or it does not, and you must more info carry the weight of what you did in silence. Both are heavy.
There is another way. It is quieter, and that is why you do not hear much about it. A person can choose to keep their mouth shut when the talk turns ugly. They can say, “I don’t know about that, and it’s not my business,” and mean it. They can walk away from rooms that feel warm with gossip but cold with cruelty. This is harder work than adding their voice to the noise, but it keeps their soul intact.
There is courage in refusing to pass on what you cannot prove. There is strength in saying, “That person never wronged me. I will not lend my tongue to their downfall.” The world may call you dull for it. Let them. Better to be dull and decent than sharp and poisonous.
If you are the one being lied about, remember this: your job is not to chase every rumor down every alley. That race cannot be won. Your job is to keep living in a way that makes the lies look small beside your truth. Wake early. Do your work. Stay kind. Let time and your own conduct speak louder than any busy mouth.
In the end, drama burns itself out. People tire of the same fire and move on to another story, another name. What remains is the trail of harm, and the private knowledge in each person of whether they helped light the flames or quietly carried water.
A person ought to decide, early if they can, what kind of soul they want to have when the talk turns mean. The choice is simple, even if it is not easy. You can be the one who starts the slide, or the one who steps away from the edge. No one ever ruined a life by refusing to join a lie.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read my work.
May your path be gentle, your heart protected, and your spirit always at peace.
Peace be with you, always.
Roy Dawson
Earth Angel Master Magical Healer
Singer, Songwriter, Poet