When People Need You to Be the Problem

After months of problems, complaints, and missed marks, a conversation finally had to happen.

“Essentially, she is unable to perform her basic job duties,” one staff member said.

Another chimed in: “She’s a hot mess. There are times when she can’t even finish her sentences.”

The implication was obvious. No one had to say it out loud. The room understood.

The most obvious explanation for the glaring issue with this employee was also the simplest one: she was, in the most classic sense, an alcoholic. She showed up to work drunk. She drank behind closed doors. She stumbled across the dining room floor. She brought chaos into a space that required steadiness.

But instead of acknowledging the obvious, the owner used the moment to revive an old accusation.

She looked directly at my friend and said, “The reason she couldn’t perform her job duties is because of the toxic work culture you created here.”

And just like that, the room changed.

There was a pause. A silence that only comes when everyone knows something absurd has just been said, but no one is sure whether to challenge it.

My friend sat there stunned.

Thirty minutes later, she submitted her resignation.

Not because the accusation was true, but because sometimes the clearest sign that a situation is beyond repair is when the truth is standing in plain sight and someone still chooses fiction.

She didn’t resign because she was guilty. She resigned because she was done being the container for someone else’s denial.

Done with the chaos.
Done with the resentment.
Done with the emotional gymnastics required to survive in a system where accountability was always for other people, never for the person in charge.

As much as she had tried to show up for a job she genuinely loved, it became painfully clear that she would never be seen accurately in that environment. She would only ever be seen through the lens of false accusations designed to shift responsibility away from the person who had actually created the culture.

And when I heard this story, it hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Because I know exactly what it feels like when someone needs you to be the problem.

“The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

That’s the idea behind Occam’s Razor.

And lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

When I sat down at my laptop to read the email I had been waiting for, I thought I was prepared. I thought I had spent enough time doing the internal work to handle whatever truth was waiting for me on the other side.

I was wrong.

I spent the next 24 hours in absolute shock.

For nearly a year, I’ve known there were pieces of the story I didn’t have. I’ve lived with the ache of incomplete understanding. I’ve sat with the rage, the disgust, and the grief that came from watching my past be weaponized in ways I never could have imagined.

I’ve had to clear out the noise.
Question my instincts.
Revisit memories I thought I understood.
Examine my own choices with a level of scrutiny that became almost punishing.

And I did that work because I wanted to be ready.

Ready to be present when the truth surfaced.
Ready to hold complexity without collapsing into bitterness.
Ready to live out the principles I talk about so often – truth, accountability, healing, integrity.

I wanted to believe that when the time came, restoration might still be possible.

But no amount of inner work could have prepared me for what I read.

Because what I discovered wasn’t just painful.

It was unreasonable.

And there is something uniquely destabilizing about being harmed not only by lies, but by lies so irrational that they reveal just how badly someone needed to avoid reality.

The Problem Was Never Gossip

People have said all the usual things:

“I’m not even sure how to respond for you.”
“You can’t argue with crazy.”
“That is clearly a them problem.”
“They know what you do for a living, right?”
“Sounds like it’s easier to believe the unreasonable than the reasonable.”

And honestly? They aren’t wrong.

But the truth is, gossip itself has never been what rattled me most.

I grew up poor and unkempt. I learned early what it meant to be looked at, judged, whispered about, misunderstood. You get used to people creating stories about you when they don’t know what to do with what they see.

Later, I married someone who was deeply obsessed with reputation. And when someone is obsessed with their reputation, gossip doesn’t feel small to them – it feels catastrophic.

After our divorce, his favorite topic became me.

Still, even then, gossip wasn’t the deepest wound.

What unsettled me was the unreasonableness of it all.

Because when someone cannot tolerate the truth, they will often reach for the explanation that protects them most – not the one that makes the most sense.

And my ex-husband did that often.

As he struggled to accept responsibility for his role in the divorce, his explanations became less and less grounded in reality and more and more rooted in self-protection. The goal was never clarity. The goal was preservation – of ego, of image, of innocence.

And when someone is committed to protecting a fragile narrative, they will choose absurdity over accountability every single time.

That is what has been so hard to process.

Not just that lies were told.
Not just that my past was weaponized.
But that the stories being told required me to carry things that were never mine to hold in the first place.

It is one thing to be misunderstood.

It is another thing entirely to be turned into a necessary villain in someone else’s internal mythology.

When Someone Needs an Excuse, They’ll Use a Person

I talk a lot about accountability.

Not just in the obvious sense of being held accountable after the fact, but in the deeper sense of self-awareness while you are making choices.

Because if you move through life disconnected from your own motives, your own patterns, your own damage, you will eventually arrive at destruction and ask, How did this happen?

That question sounds innocent.
A lot of times, it isn’t.

Sometimes “How did this happen?” is just another way of saying, “How can I avoid seeing my role in this?”

That is part of what has made this entire experience so traumatic.

One day, my life simply changed.

At the time, I thought I understood what was happening. I thought I understood the relationships I was in, the intentions around me, the choices I was making. I acted from a place of love, care, and sincerity – and then found myself shattered, replaying everything in my mind, trying to locate where I had gone so wrong.

I carried shame.
I carried embarrassment.
I carried confusion.
I carried responsibility for things that, as I now understand more clearly, were never mine to carry.

And over the last two months, as pieces of the story have slowly surfaced and the gaps in my understanding have begun to close, I’ve had to confront a difficult truth:

This was never about me.

Not really.

I was not the cause.
I was not the catalyst.
I was not the explanation.

I was useful.

Useful as a distraction.
Useful as a projection.
Useful as a weapon.
Useful as an excuse.
Useful as a pawn in a game I never agreed to play.

And that realization has brought both grief and clarity.

Because once you understand that someone needed you to be the problem, a lot of things begin to make sense.

The distortion.
The hostility.
The irrationality.
The refusal to engage with obvious truth.

It was never about solving anything.
It was about avoiding something.

Beware of the Role You’re Being Cast In

I wrote recently: beware when you are being used as a weapon in someone else’s relationship.

What I understand now is that the warning goes even further than that.

Beware when you are being used as:

• the explanation
• the distraction
• the scapegoat
• the emotional escape hatch
• the proof someone needs to avoid facing themselves

Because some people do not want truth.
They want relief.

And if the truth threatens the story they need to survive, they will choose a lie that costs you your peace before they ever choose a reality that costs them their ego.

That is not love.
That is not honesty.
That is not confusion.

That is avoidance with collateral damage.

And one of the hardest lessons I have had to learn is this:

You cannot heal inside a story someone else is committed to falsifying.

At some point, you have to step outside of it.

You have to stop defending yourself against things that were never rooted in truth.
You have to stop over-explaining your heart to people committed to misunderstanding it.
You have to stop trying to be accurately seen by people who benefit from seeing you inaccurately.

Sometimes peace doesn’t come from being believed.

Sometimes peace comes from no longer needing to participate in the lie.

The simplest explanation is usually the right one.

And when someone rejects the simplest explanation in favor of the most unreasonable one, it usually tells you everything you need to know.

Not about you.

About them.

With all my love, xoxo J