Off The Deep End

This isn’t a person that I thought that I would ever blog about, but oh Lord, do we need to talk about Kanye West. I have been fascinated by the unfolding story of Kanye’s divorce from Kim Kardashian. The rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) has gone off the deep end with jealousy. Aside from the very public feuding and clap backs going on with Kim, he is running around spreading rumours about his estranged wife’s new dude Pete Davidson, saying that he is (and I quote), “down low gay and has AIDS”. Might it take one to know one, Ye? (if the Jeffrey Starr rumours are to be believed).

Oh Ye…if you’re resorting to spreading rumours about the guy who has replaced you, then clearly you’re burnt out and you need to wrap it up. I can’t lie. I’m indulging my own fascination here because I want to explore what on earth is going on with Kanye and why he is behaving like more of a clown than usual. it is not just celebrities who find themselves in situations like this so let us also talk about what to do when you are trying to move on but your ex just won’t let go and is doing the most to make your life a living hell.

The best way to stop somebody like Kanye in their tracks is to ignore them. Hear me out. Yes this is frustrating and crazy-making to have to do this, but it is also highly strategic. There is a time to engage and there is also a time when silence is truly golden. I say this because what does someone who is trying to slander your reputation want? They want your attention. They want to engage and be seen as an equal. Silence denies that person the attention based oxygen that they crave. When you’re still living your life contrary to whatever is being said about you, then they start to single themselves out by saying things that are increasingly more erratic and disproportionate. And what would someone like this typically do next? They escalate. They simply cannot stop. They are so desperate for that attention and engagement, that their claims are going to get bigger and bigger.

How do I know this? Let me tell you a true story. A few years back, a guy I was dating broke up with me and weirdly enough, it was his new girlfriend who started to try to do this to me. I say try as boy oh boy did this not work. She started close to home, a few childish jibes and attempts to contact me and an invasion of the places in which I hung out. I didn’t respond because I don’t engage with nonsense and I live by the adage that no one above you is coming for you. Then, her escalations begun to get bigger and bigger to the point of being ridiculous and clownish. I heard from mutual friends that she spent every damn day glued to this very blog and my social media, desperate for a clap back or to find some validation and relevance for her. I was told that she spent months whining and complaining to my ex about me (which is wonderful poetic justice hahahaha) and what did that serve to do? It highlighted for the whole world to see just how crazed she was and how threatened by me she felt. Kanye is also living proof of the escalation of crazy.

When he wasn’t getting Kim’s attention by begging her to come back to him, rapping about her in songs, showing up wherever she is or buying a house across the street from her like a psychopath, he began to escalate. When people escalate from a place of desperation for your attention, it shows. Their claims and their tactics become more and more desperate. The beauty of this is that whatever wrong doing you may or may not have committed is drowned out by the insane and demented noise that your enemy is creating. Doesn’t the devil always make the most noise on his way out of the door? By that point, they are throwing everything that they have at the wall and hoping that something sticks. I’m using a celebrity example of this because a lot of people assume that celebrities have their life all figured out, operate from a higher plane of awareness and are better in most ways. In actual fact, you’ll find more examples of celebrity being in a far worse place because their self esteem is chronically low and so they are a whole technicolour next level version of our worst behaviours.

All that being said, it was the content of what Kanye was saying that fascinated me. Pete being “down low gay” reeks of being a truism to me. What I mean by this is that the things that we hate in others are the things that we are trying to deny in ourselves. What is interesting is that when we insult someone, we do so from a position of what we ourselves would find insulting. It is like a mirror into what we ourselves are most afraid of or what we are guilty of. Let’s go back to my obsessed friend above as an example. Her insults about me centred on me being a downgrade from her and how I wanted to be her. The truth was that she felt like the downgrade, not just with me but throughout her entire life and drove herself insane trying to prove to anyone and everyone how classy and educated she was. As for the wanting to be her part, well, let’s just say she rebranded herself into a carbon copy of me that might have creeped me out if it wasn’t so fascinatingly weird.

So back to Kanye and his calling Pete, “secretly gay”. Very interesting. If my ex were dating a woman, I wouldn’t call her a lesbian. I might take another swipe like calling her a stupid trash bag and I would chose those insults because I want to be neither stupid nor trashy. Speaking of stupid, given that Pete’s entire brand is built upon seducing beautiful women in Hollywood who are, aesthetically speaking, way out of his league, calling him secretly gay is a little stupid. Is it a mass delusion amongst the women of Hollywood to date this gay guy? Why? Why would the likes of Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale or Kim Kardashian ever need a fake boyfriend? But Kanye didn’t stop here, oh no, he went for what he deems to be the “gayest” that someone could be – gay with AIDS. First of all, how dare he use disease as an insult and as a character assassination. If someone is suffering from a disease and got the worst news of their life one day and yet Kanye thinks that this is something to make fun of? This is actually disgusting. May I just add in that I have never met a homophobic man who isn’t also deeply misogynistic and also a misogynist who isn’t also deeply homophobic. Are we beginning to see why Kim left?

One might say that people use Kanye’s mental ill health against him too, but do two wrongs make a right? I have an issue with the fact that Kanye purposely chooses to remain unmedicated when it comes to managing his bipolar disorder. He is dedicated to spraying his venom all over the world without a care for managing his episodes and without care for whom he hurts in the process. This is a drunk driver mentality and yes, I have a real issue with them too.

What lessons can we learn from this festival of weirdness? You may have been in a similar situation, maybe not to this demented degree, but you may have had an ex running all over town saying who knows what to whom about you. First of all, we can definitely learn from Kim’s example because what has she said about these insults? Nothing. For what it’s worth, neither has Pete responded to any of the Kanye hate out of respect for Kim. Let’s break this down. As I said, the way forward truly is to ignore them because what they want to be is a person in your life that you listen to. For someone who is a narcissist (and yes, I believe Kanye is and I do not use this label lightly); a toxic person who has this self aggrandising idea, nothing is more devastating to such a pathology than being irrelevant. One doesn’t need to be an A-list celebrity to have this mentality, we see it all the time in small towns and at the more ordinary end of the spectrum of life.

Now, I also think that a situation like this is a great opportunity to gather more information on the new person that you are dating. It is very easy to base our judgements only on the good times; the great dates, the great sex and the wonderfully deep conversations. Yes these are all data points and need to be logged, but we also need to log the bad ones. The true measure of character is not how you react when everything is going your way, but rather how do you react when things don’t? We have to log everything as dating is data, data is science and science is neutrality. A smart person bases their conclusions on the facts. You have to twist theories to suit facts and not facts to suit theories.

How does this relate here? You need to know how your new person acts when the going gets tough; when it turns out that you have a crazy ex who is not going anywhere for a while. Kanye will eventually run out of steam and move on but only if he is iced out. Any attention will reset the clock. He will run out of fire and look like such a clown that even the hip hop DJs who worship at the alter of Kanye will eventually tell him that this is a bad look. In my trawling through the gossip on this whole circus, I found a really good point made by the New York Post. They pointed out how Kanye had spent the last few years rebranding himself into an ultra Christian, God loving man but let us consider for a moment just how “Christ like” sh1tting on someone who has AIDS is? Not that I think Pete does have AIDS, but what if it were true?

The most hurtful and damaging thing to do to someone is to share their personal and private health information without their consent. Where is the chapter in the bible where Jesus roasts his disciples? I don’t think that ever happened and so it goes to show how full of sh1t Kanye really is. When the going gets tough, when Sunday Service isn’t selling out and people aren’t wearing your dodgy clothes and designs and when you are out of the circle, how do you react? Do you handle this with a modicum of grace? Apparently not. If there was any part of Kim that misses Kanye, I think he has kissed that goodbye. I couldn’t have wrapped this up in a little bow and make it look any better for Kim if I tried. This is turning out wonderfully for her. Kanye is dating a cringe lord, he himself has turned himself into a cringe god and Kim is out here thriving.

What if your new squeeze is not so happy to stand back and let the circus pack up and leave town all of its own accord? This is kinda a tricky one. As Sun Tzu says in the Art of War, “If your aims be dark, fall like a thunderbolt.” Men are animals and sometimes, this is how they work things out, in a physical and overt way. Cowards tend to lurk in the shadows and to gossip like this is a cowards way. Maybe the way to end this is to confront him? However there are other ways of confrontation rather than physical violence. You can do it in a big loud way on social media – social humiliation. There is a reason why in olden times, people were put into stocks, paraded through the streets and executions happened at midday in full view of the whole town.

Playing tactically requires discipline and although it is tempting to throw shade back in retaliation or deliver a hard blow, we need to take an objective look at their tactics and figure out what would hurt them the most rather than what would make you feel better. What might make you feel better might not shut them down in the way that you think it will. I firmly believe that keeping moving forward is the best response because when you give someone enough rope, sooner or later they hang themselves. Exactly like our case in point Kanye is doing. Non action is an action in the long run. It simply means that you choose to rise above the mud slinging if like me, you believe that no one bigger than you is coming for you.

Go Well.