Few things take me apart faster than being blamed for something I had no hand in. Someone decides I am the reason a thing went wrong, says it to other people, and even when I know it is not true, I lose sleep over it. I rehearse the defence in the shower. I wait for a chance to set the record straight. For days my mind belongs to that one sentence somebody said about me.
What gets me is how out of proportion it is. A real problem in front of me, I can usually deal with. Something untrue that somebody said about me can sit in my head for a week.
Lately I have started to understand why. When someone blames me unfairly, the real sting sits underneath the task itself. It lands on my standing in other people's eyes. I want to be seen as fair, as careful, as the person who did the right thing. So the blame reaches past what I actually did and goes at the picture I carry of myself, and I will spend a surprising amount of energy trying to protect that picture.
The Bhagavad Gita describes a kind of person who has put that weight down. The one who is steady, it says, stays the same whether people praise him or blame him, whether they honour him or insult him. (12.18 to 12.19) It is the same person in both rooms, no longer handing his peace to the opinion of whoever spoke last.
I am nowhere near that. It has changed one small thing though. When blame lands now, I try to ask one question first: is there an actual fact here I need to set right? If there is, I correct it once, plainly, to the person who needs to hear it. After that the rest is no longer in my hands. The only thing left is whether I can let the verdict sit and carry on with my work anyway.
The hard truth is that you can never fully control what people decide about you. You can answer once with the facts, and then you live your answer out slowly, through what you actually do. Chasing every wrong impression is a fire you can never put out, and it burns the days you could have spent on something real.
So now when somebody gets me wrong, I am learning to say my piece once and then go back to work. Most days it still stings. I am getting a little better at letting it go before the day ends.
When someone blames you for something you did not do, how long does it stay in your head?