Everyone Is Ghosting Me Today!

Unlike most professional colleagues, mine are unresponsive and overly critical!

Dear Molly,

I’m having the worst fucking day. Everyone is ghosting me. Last week it seemed like I had all of these professional opportunities, and now everyone is avoiding me or going back on their promises. I just mean that I get treated like shit professionally all the time. I’ve been doing this for decades and it never changes.

Every time something starts to not go my way i start to feel so angry and bad. I just start to feel victimized and angry and stupid and ashamed and like everyone is out to get me. I don’t know if I can stop feeling this way! I try to just keep going despite the fact that I just feel like throwing things all the time. I feel like people are always lying to me and misleading me and telling me one thing and doing another thing and I start getting into this mindset like WHY DO I EVEN BOTHER?

Does everyone get really mad all the time? Or is it just me? I constantly feel like people are yelling at me, berating me, being condescending to me (or at least that’s how it feels), telling me they’ll help me and then changing their minds, not calling me back, lying, etc. On the other hand, I am a fairly well-liked, fairly charismatic woman, I think. I sometimes wonder if I just expect to be treated well and then when I am not, I am shocked. Does any of this make any sense?

Pissed

Dear Pissed,

Charismatic, well-liked women who are also angry and suspicious occasionally are treated like shit a lot. Why? 1) People don’t like women, period. Women and men alike dislike women. Also? 2) People can smell anger and sadness and suspicion from a mile away. They know when you’re conflicted – not consciously, but they can sense it, and it makes them uneasy, like cats in an open field, or like dogs walking by a flag flapping furiously in the wind, or like men trying to sip a cold delicious beer among friends, but then one of their friends brings along an assertive, funny, opinionated woman and she starts talking and it ruins everything.

No one likes a charismatic woman, is my real point. She’s too persuasive, too transfixing. She’s already got tits, for fuck’s sake! Throw in some charm and it’s like she’s armed to the teeth, dripping in automatic weaponry and draped in bandoliers. It’s overkill. If she’s tall or she has nice lips or she looks you right in the eye or she makes a face like you smell bad, well then it’s like she’s got a morning star and a mace and a machete in her purse. It’s like she dabbles in plastic explosives but says it’s just a hobby. It’s like she’s got a van full of fertilizer parked out front. It’s like she’s got daggers hidden in the soles of her Rachel Comey mules.

Charismatic women ruin everything for everyone, always. They remind men in particular that they’re slow and not nearly attractive enough and they have stray hairs growing out of their ears. That’s why men always try to interrupt charismatic women or give them some job to do so they’re occupied elsewhere, or they compliment them but then neg them right after that, or they inform them that some dimension of their personality is suboptimal (in a tone that says everyone agrees, trust me!). Even though these idiot men are really just talking about little harmless human quirks that dampen their boners ever so slightly, even though they’re really just saying, “I feel scared when you’re around” and also “I wish my own girlfriend were scarier!” they find some way to translate this into concrete instructions: Be less like this, be more like that.

Or they say shit like “She isn’t promotable” or “She isn’t girlfriend material” or “She’s crazy” or “She can’t win the general election against Trump so why not go with the deeply confused old idiot man instead?”

And God forbid this is a professional interaction we’re talking about, because then these men will take their half-hard boners and use them as an excuse for giving micro-manage-y instructions so off-base and ridiculous that it’s hard not to snort audibly when you hear them. A man with a half-mast dick will make a woman work much harder than anyone else while simultaneously demoting her, just as punishment for failing to keep him rock hard around the clock. A charismatic woman will say something like “I’m not sure that’s applicable” or “Let’s go back to the principles in play here because I think you’re losing the thread” or even “I’ll take that into consideration” (see also: get off my dick already, dude) and a man will feel his boner shrink (Or grow? Or grow then shrink? God, who cares!) and he’ll encounter that indifference as something that borders on an actionable offense.

Your charisma makes everything hard for everyone else, literally and figuratively, and then, paradoxically, everyone blames you when it’s not hard ENOUGH, literally and figuratively.

You can’t fucking win, in other words. It’s not the fault of the individual man, necessarily, any more than your enormous charisma is your fault. Our ding-dong dipshitty culture makes it so. We are deep-dicked by our dumb dull culture every day, drilled and drilled and drilled into the ground by it. And it’s not a good lay. It’s bad and it’s boring and it hurts but mostly it’s boring as fuck.

So of course people change their minds about you all the time. You are misled and condescended to and ghosted because people are afraid of you and they hate you. They might notice that you’re conflicted and angry, but that’s not why they hate you. They hate you because as a charismatic woman, you’re enormously powerful. All people of all genders hate you for that. They’re turned on by your power and this leads them to overpromise and then they’re embarrassed by what big boners they once had for you (just as they’re embarrassed by ALL of their passions, don’t even fucking get me started, they’re ruled by their shame, of course, but also, shame and passion are basically all blended together in them, it’s indistinguishable, this is true for most people, actually, most people are basically just rooting around in the dark trying to fuck anything and anyone, literally and figuratively, all the fucking time).

The point is, when you’re a woman and you excite people, and people believe in you and embrace you and praise you and bow down to you and tell all of their friends about you and invite you to parties and try to fuck you, etc etc etc, then it’s only a matter of time until they turn on you and criticize you and mock you behind your back and stop inviting you to parties and try to fuck you over. That’s life as a charismatic woman.

It’s so obvious. You already know this, don’t you? But you keep torturing yourself anyway.

So the real question is: When are you going to get over this shit? When are you going to stop torturing yourself for no fucking reason? People bail on you professionally and you experience it as if they’re yelling at you and berating you? That’s absurd. It’s almost like you enjoy amplifying every tiny bit of emotional stimulus you encounter. When are you going to grow some thicker skin? When are you going to just put a sensation down and walk away from it? You’re like a dog who wanders up to every turd and sniffs like crazy. Why? When are you going to learn to power down your combative, panicked, self-hating, enraged response and just say “This isn’t personal,” and then go eat some fucking oatmeal cookies or some shit?

Because literally nothing is personal. Other people love and then hate you for completely impersonal reasons. They hate you because their shame-passion boners can’t find a hole to fuck in the pitch-black dark. They hate you because you’re interesting and charming and funny. They hate you because they aren’t. It’s not just that they’re just jealous. They’re just jealous and they’re also just confused and just sad and just needy and just angry and just afraid and just horny.

And they were raised in a ding dong dipshit culture that tells them that there’s no way to be any of those things out in the open. You have to hide it. And then along comes you, someone who doesn’t fucking hide it. And that makes them want to fuck your face into the ground.

Boring. Boring like the letters I keep getting from men, telling me I’m not evil enough. They’re so fucking fixated on how evil I need to be. They want me to know how I can fix this or that. They take their half-hard boners and use them as an excuse to give me micro-manage-y instructions so off-base and ridiculous that it’s hard not to snort audibly when I read them.

Tale as old as motherfucking time. So do what I do: Enjoy how fucking stupid they are, have a laugh, and move the fuck on. Ghost them. Tune them out. Find someone interesting or charming who isn’t a simple circuit of a human being and talk to that person instead, or work for that person, or collaborate with that person. Whatever.

Stop taking the confused threatened humpy animals of our idiot culture so personally. You might be charismatic, but this part of you is super fucking boring. You’re too old for this shit. These are just flags flapping in the wind. This is just an open field. It will never change or go away. This is reality. Grow up.

Molly

Polly’s evil twin wants to tell you what to do, too. Write to askmolly at protonmail dot com.