I HAVE HEARD A LOT ABOUT YOU - by Emetekefe Akpovwovwo

This is a sentence we exchange so casually it barely registers as language anymore. Someone extends a hand and before you have said a word about yourself, they have already met a version of you. We laugh it off and say, “All good things, I hope,” and move on to safer ground. That sentence is not small talk. It is a confession. It means you have already been described to me and I have already begun deciding who you are. Think about what actually happens in that moment. A person you are meeting for the first time is not meeting you, they are meeting a composite. A mutual friend’s offhand comment. A colleague’s complaint from a bad week. A story told at a dinner you weren’t at, edited by someone else’s memory, seasoned by their mood that night. By the time you walk into the room, a draft of you has already been circulating without your consent and drafts have consequences. Some people will warm to you instantly, carrying goodwill they didn’t earn from you but from someone else’s account of you. Others will keep a careful distance because of a story you never got to tell yourself. Loyalties get inherited before friendships are formed. People take sides in conflicts they weren’t present for, simply because they heard about you before they knew you. We treat this as harmless but it is not. It is how reputations are built on secondhand material, brick by brick, without the subject ever laying a single one. There is a line I have come to hold onto for years, one of those sentences that rearranges something in you the moment you hear it. I like how South African entrepreneur and global keynote speaker, Vusi Thembekwayo, puts it in an interview he had with Nigerian media entrepreneur and filmmaker, Chude, recently on the <a class="tc-blue" href="https://twocents.space/insights/tag/withchude">#WithChude</a> show “I don’t mind being disliked but I do mind being misunderstood.” At first it sounds almost defiant but sit with it a little longer and it becomes something closer to wisdom. Dislike, when it’s earned through actual experience of you, is at least honest. Someone met you, weighed you and decided. That’s a verdict you can respect or even disagree with but misunderstanding is different. Misunderstanding means someone built an entire opinion of you out of materials that were never really yours and then treated that fiction as fact. You didn’t lose an argument. You never even got to enter the room. That’s why I have stopped being casual about being misunderstood. I clarify. I correct the record when I can. Not because I need everyone to like me but because I would rather be disliked for who I actually am than admired or avoided for who I am not. So maybe the fix is to stop saying it lazily. The next time you say it to someone, try being specific and not drop it like a mysterious little threat. You could say “someone mentioned how you handled a tough situation at work and I wanted to meet you.” Specificity turns gossip into generosity. It gives the other person something to stand on instead of something to wonder about. Also, the next time it’s said to you, pause before you laugh it off and ask questions out of respect for the fact that a version of you has been living in someone’s head, doing things on your behalf, shaping how they will treat you, long before you arrived. You deserve to know what that version has been saying because the quiet truth underneath all of this is that opinions rarely start with us. They start with what’s said about us in rooms we never entered. The least we can do for ourselves and for each other is stop letting that sentence pass by unexamined.

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