It happens to everyone at one time or another. You walk into a room or up to a table at lunch where everyone had been talking and laughing, and suddenly there’s silence. Or maybe people who are normally nice to you suddenly start giving you funny looks and don’t want to talk to you.
Odds are when this happens you’ve become the target of gossip. Someone started a rumor about you that’s being passed around the school. It’s probably something silly, unbelievable and untrue, but that doesn’t mean it won’t change people’s opinions of you. Sometimes it is true, and that can hurt even more because you probably shared a secret with a friend and suddenly it was all over school.
A lot of gossip has to do with relationship. Someone might start a rumor that you’re secretly dating someone no one likes, or that you’re having sex with a bunch of different people. Other popular rumors have to do with the object of the gossip being poor, overweight, unattractive, bad at sports, having trouble at school, or getting in trouble with the law.
Other teens, in particular girls, tend to focus on the one thing in your life you’re most insecure about and develop the perfect little lie to make you feel horrible when you hear about it. That’s often the point of gossip: to hurt another person’s feelings.
It’s easy to say that you shouldn’t let it bother you when you know people are talking about you behind your back, but it’s a much more difficult thing to actually do that. It is best, however, if you’d don’t try to confront the person who you think started the rumor or try to disprove whatever the accusation was. These tactics will probably just make the situation worse.
If the rumor is so bad you feel the need to defend yourself, try to make a joke out of it. If someone asks you if it is true, laugh it off and say “can you believe (whoever started the rumor) would say such a thing.” You can even try spreading the rumor around yourself by saying “have you heard what (that person) is saying about me? Isn’t that crazy?”
If you can be cool in the face of gossip and not freak out when you hear a story that’s being spread about it, its likely people will stop making up rumors about you. The reaction is the main reason people spread rumors, and having a fit just makes it look like the rumor is true.
So stay calm and the rumor will die down quickly. They are just a piece of Shit. :)
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