If I’ve learned one thing, haters are gonna hate if it’s the last thing they do. Fortunately and sometimes, it is.
The best thing about having a dark, sordid past, is having a public dark, sordid past. For those who know me and many who don’t, if there’s one thing for certain, I’m pretty transparent. It took handcuffs of course, but since then, my past is so widely known and told in so many of my own and others’ stories, it’s pretty much old hat and inconsequential anymore. My stories themselves however, have helped free many who’d held themselves captive to their own.
[Enter still addicted ugly person with time on their hands and an axe to grind.]
Having spent the better part of a week helping someone out of their own bad mess at great expense of time and money, instead of gratitude or at least silence, they embarked on a tour of public badmouthing me like a Salem witch trial to which a. nobody came and b. they ended up hanging themselves. They’d spent countless hours gathering internet evidence of my former bad character, criminal history and other Google hunts to defame and discredit me. To this day, I still don’t know their motives or goals and mostly don’t care. Long gone are the days trying to understand people like this, but since I’ve grown up, I just say “Some people…”
Going public with their findings to my friends, family and acquaintances they were met with blank stares who aptly replied “So what?” and “Yeah, he wrote a cool story about that on his website, you should read it.”
Haters are gonna hate.
Transparent living is not simply an admission of your skeletons, but putting them on parade in dunce hats for the world to see. Good 12 step programs are about using transparency to help others free themselves from their own secrets and disempowering and disarming your past from its ability to haunt your future.
So when the bullseye is on your back and haters take aim, transparency is your best defense because the bullets go right through you. Active shooters with bad aim can’t hurt you. They do, however, get caught with their pants down, left to hang with their own skeletons and bullseyes on their own backs.