People talk. You can count on them for that.

You can count on them talking about other people, despite how little is in it for them with that time spent. Psycho-analyses can easily be done from soap operas on TV and characters in stories, but I guess sometimes nothing beats extracting all you can from the real life.

However I don’t count on them to talk truth. Being a recovering liar myself, I don’t see the point in expecting the upside from everyone. There’s so much fun after all in being pleasantly surprised, discovering the opposite of a monster in everyone, instead of the other way around. There’s so much pretty&good in the world than to go pick after what you think doesn’t qualify.

People talk. I don’t see why I should object.
If they can’t understand the the capacity of my social life, the elasticity of human relations, the fuzzy and the facts, they can ask me themselves. I’ll draw them my margins and tell them that these are my pages, and nothing is confusing in them. I know where the story leads and why some relationships are the way they are. I am not a good person. But there are a few things I don’t screw up, there are a few things that mean so much to me that I’d rather people think me irresponsible so I can spend all my energy protecting what I already have.

When I cannot draw my own margins, my borders, dots my ‘i’s and cross my ‘t’s, then by all means talk on my behalf.
But until then, you can keep your adjectives. trade em with others.
The rest of the story is mine.