“You look mean.”
“Are you okay?”
“She’s mean.”

Says the person who has never actually conversed with me.

I have heard it since high school. Usually, from someone I did not even want in my face in the first place. And it was always said like they were diagnosing me with something or like I was an issue. Like my face was a problem that needed fixing or explaining.

It followed me into college, too.

“Resting bitch face.” Common, but that was another one.

So much so that during my first year at Mercy, I genuinely heard people refer to me as “the mean girl” before I had even spoken to them. Not after. Before.

And I remember thinking that was kind of insane. I remember feeling weird and like maybe I was the problem. Maybe my RBF was an issue.

Because at some point it stopped being about how I actually was and started being about what people assumed before I ever got the chance to exist in front of them fully.

Then one day, someone finally got the courage to talk to me.

And it turns out I was not mean at all. I was just quiet. I was just observing. I was just not being friendly on demand for people I did not know. I never cared to fit in and that showed.

But by then, their story had already been written.

Because what I later found out was that a girl I had never spoken to or even acknowledged had gone around telling people on my floor that I was mean. That I was a bitch and unapproachable. The only thing I knew was that she lived across the hall from me.

I was a new girl from a different college who came in the Spring semester after groups were already formed, since orientation, and people were asking about me. We can all guess where that probably came from.

But still, it stuck.

Not because of anything I actually did, but because I did not do what people expected me to do. I did not smile at everyone. I did not entertain random conversations. I did not soften myself for people I did not even know.

And apparently, that is enough sometimes.

I think about that a lot now.

How quickly a narrative can form about you without you ever participating in it. How someone else’s perception can become the version of you that people repeat. And how little it sometimes takes for it to spread, especially in spaces where people already want a reason to label you before they understand you.

And honestly I have learned to be okay with it.

Because most of the time, the people who decided I was “mean” were people I did not actually want access to me in the first place.

There is something funny about that. How not being available becomes a personality flaw in other people’s eyes. How simply having a face that is not constantly inviting suddenly turns into attitude.

But I have also learned that a lot of it is projection.

People do not always like being met with boundaries they did not expect. They do not always like when you are not overly accommodating. Especially when they are used to women being automatically warm, automatically open, automatically accessible.

So when you are not that, they fill in the blanks themselves.

And the story spreads faster than the truth ever gets a chance to.

But I am not really interested in chasing down every version of me that other people created without my permission.

I know who I am when I actually speak. I know that I light up like a bulb with my people. I know I’m softer and more sensitive than I would ever care to admit. I know how I am when I am in a space I want to be in. And I know that my face, my silence, my boundaries are not an invitation for people to define me.

If anything, I think I have learned that being misunderstood sometimes comes with the territory of being left alone by the wrong people.

I don’t like being left alone with the wrong people and I am okay with that.