Why what I think doesn't matter. (Originally published Sept 4th 2012)

I hate to get all meta on this shit but I can’t get this stuff out of my head. 

When I was about 13 a man who my Mum used to work with and who’s wife likes to think herself my second mother tried to explain to me why it shouldn’t matter what people think of you. I didn’t know this, mainly because I was 13, but these words would come back to me at some of the most important times in my life. I have never, not once, been universally liked. I’ve not even been one of those people that no one really cares like ‘Soandso did this’ and everyone replies ‘and?’. I have nearly always been the topic of discussion. I have been loved absurdly and brilliantly by absurd and brilliant people, I have been hated by some people that I am sure had very good reason to or at the very least thought they did. 

Anyway, the words that Paul (his name is Paul) gave me when I was 13 were somewhere in the region of this ‘Your opinion about me shouldn’t and doesn’t matter to me and in turn your opinion shouldn’t and doesn’t matter to you.’ It was longer than this, with me not really understand for a long time. To be honest with you, I wasn’t really very sure what he meant until I was 16/17. I’m sure in a few years time something will occur to me about these words that creates a whole new world of understanding. But I think what he meant was that my opinion is irrelevant not that it doesn’t matter. My opinion about you, or anything really, is irrelevant. What I think matters me, just as what you think matters to you but what you think about me and what I think about you is completely irrelevant. 

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t voice our opinions, the fact that they matter to us makes them important and if people didn’t voice what was important to them we wouldn’t have had Votes for Women, the Civil Rights Movement and that bit on children’s television where they read out the birthday cards. So when I type angrily about girls in too short shorts or Weight Watchers, you can gladly disagree with me without it bothering me one tiny bit. 

To give you a real life example, there was an anonymous person on Formspring asking me questions why girls ‘of my size’ constantly spoke about their weight and what they looked like. Now, I countered that all women constantly spoke about how much they weighed and what they look like and that thin girls do so more than most in my experience. Both of our views mattered to us (enough that both of us would publish them on the internet) but what she thought about what I write and what I think about her slightly anti-feminist generalisations (its my blog, I’m allowed to spin this in my favour) are irrelevant to both of us. 

So as much as a lot of you are now hoping that this means I will no longer bother your Facebook news feed with my drivel, alas I will continue to write this. And also, I;m really sorry that this does not make even a little bit on sense. 

K?