For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why people in my family were starting to act differently around me. I knew my aunt talked about people because she talked about everybody, but I didn’t realize what she was doing with me until much later. She had a way of saying something bad about me without actually sounding like she was saying something bad. She might tell someone about something I supposedly said or did and then follow it with, “Oh, she probably didn’t mean it that way.” If you weren’t paying attention, it sounded like she was defending me. For a long time, I probably would have thought the same thing.

But she wasn’t really defending me. She had already put the thought into that person’s head. Now they were wondering why I said something, what I meant by it, or whether there was another side of me they hadn’t seen before. The worst part was that I usually had no idea these conversations were even happening. I wasn’t there to explain myself or even say, “Wait, that’s not what happened.” I would notice someone acting differently toward me later and have no idea why.

And of course, I blamed myself. I would go home and replay conversations in my head, trying to figure out what I had done. Did I say something wrong? Did I piss someone off? Was I being rude without realizing it? I spent way too much time questioning myself when I should have been questioning where all of this was coming from.

Meanwhile, my aunt got to be the nice one. She was concerned. She was trying to help. She didn’t want anyone fighting. She could somehow be right in the middle of a problem and still come across as the person trying to fix it. That’s probably why it took me so long to see what was happening. I kept looking for some big obvious betrayal, and there wasn’t one. It was little comments over years, stories told slightly differently, private things repeated, and those little “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but…” conversations that I knew nothing about.

Eventually, I started realizing how often she was somewhere in the middle of things. By then, though, some people had already changed the way they saw me. That’s the part that hurt the most. My aunt not liking me was something I could eventually accept. What was much harder to accept was realizing that people who had known me for years were willing to believe someone else’s version of me without ever coming to me and asking if it was true.