Recently, I had an experience with an article I had written being plagiarized. I thought I’d share how I felt & some ideas to address violations as a highly sensitive person.
This piece on introverts that I wrote many years ago (it was actually the first guest blog post I ever wrote) for the Tiny Buddha website got plagiarized by someone who posted it on Medium.
I wouldn’t have come to know of this at all if a kind reader who had also seen the original piece hadn’t reached out to me on my Facebook page and told me about it. Someone had copied not just the piece but even the exact same photograph that Lori Deschene (Tiny Buddha’s creator) had included with my article.
Addressing Violations as a Highly Sensitive Person.
Unlike some years ago when I would have felt terribly violated by this incident (and of course, I did feel a little violated), I knew what to do this time. Tiny Buddha is a very popular, reputed website. So is Medium. The fact that the plagiarism had occurred was also easy to establish. So, I got in touch with the folks at Medium, made a formal complaint and soon enough, this person’s account was suspended on Medium.
It turned out they had posted a couple of different articles (plagiarized from different authors) in addition to mine under their name. So, my problem was solved pretty soon and all was good. I even joked with someone that now that I had been plagiarized, I was a real writer. In a weird way, it was a back-handed compliment (but of course, not something I want to be repeated again!)
But while things turned out okay, this experience got me thinking. The topic of introversion has really exploded in the last few years, especially after Susan Cain’s book Quiet and her very famous TED talk on the power of introverts. It’s almost like introverts are the flavor of the season right now. There are more resources for introverts than ever before, more coaches, more books, more and more people talking about the subject.
As Highly Sensitive People, who are we getting our advice from?
Obviously, all of this is amazing and our introvert revolution is only just beginning. But just because now there is a demand, it’s attracting more and more people, some for the completely wrong reasons, to fulfill that demand.
I doubt that the person who plagiarized my article cared about introverts. The thing I was most struck by in this entire experience was how brazen they had been with the copying. They didn’t bother to change even one line. They had copied everything word by word. I was not sure whether this person was completely lazy or whether they just thought they would get away with it easily.
I also wondered whether they were a narcissist.
Disregarding rules, taking advantage of others and being completely blase about it are all characteristics of narcissistic people. And had it not been for the thoughtful lady who reached out to me, the truth is they would have gotten away with it.
Afterward, in a little chat I had in a Facebook group discussing this, Jacqueline Strickland commented that she thought the same thing was happening around the topic of Highly Sensitive People. Along with the many wonderful people and new resources, there were also the completely wrong elements coming along for the ride. As someone who was one of the original HSP voices in the online world that I knew of, her opinion held weight.
Till she said it, I hadn’t even thought of this.
Why it’s important for Highly Sensitive People to be Cautious.
But that’s how things work. When a topic becomes popular and grows, it also becomes a potential marketplace. There’s nothing wrong, of course, if the marketplace is fair and if the trades done in it are truly about an exchange of value. If we hire a coach or buy a course and get what we need and sometimes more than what we expected, then that is amazing!
But it is so sad that the topics that are so close to our hearts and the traits that make up the essence of who we are can also be preached by people who simply do not care. I guess it’s a reminder for all of us that we need to trust our own gut instincts about people and when it’s not that easy to decipher the other person, to really pay attention to what they are saying and decide whether we agree with it.
If someone’s advice doesn’t ring true or feel right, then we have to follow our inner sense instead of blindly following the expert. And to also remember that we have options like getting second opinions, shopping around till we are satisfied or reading books that talk about different perspectives.
In the end, sifting and weighing and deciding what works for us is up to us. In the end, although we do need experts for their knowledge, when it comes to what’s good for us, We are the experts on ourselves.
That’s comforting, isn’t it?
People can plagiarize us. They can pose as something they are not. They can fool us for a little bit. But we can stand up for ourselves. We can pay attention to what we need and reach for it. We can find out more about where we need to go.
No one can take that away from us.
Remember, you are the expert on your own self. No one can be the ultimate decider.
This can be hard sometimes.
But this is also the very thing that makes us free.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the memoir The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal experiences from her own life as an emotional empath with insights from different psychological theories to give empaths more tools and resources to connect with themselves.
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