It Was Never a Typo

I left a comment on a TikTok the other day. Nothing profound. Someone was talking about secondary school, and I said what I actually think about secondary school, which is that it was shite and I'm glad to be out the other side of it. The exact wording was "thank the gods I'm out of education."

The first reply I got was one word long.

god*

An asterisk. The little mark you use when you've caught someone's typo and you're being helpful about it.

The Correction Was the Whole Argument

I want to be precise about why that one character bothered me, because it would be easy to read this as me getting wound up over nothing, and I've written enough about people getting wound up over nothing that I'd rather not become the example.

It's not the disagreement. People disagree with me about theology constantly and most of it rolls straight off. It's the form the disagreement arrived in.

An asterisk isn't an argument. It's a correction. It's the notation you reach for when the other person has made a mistake of the kind that doesn't need discussing – a misspelling, a slip of the thumb, a word that came out wrong. You don't asterisk a position. You asterisk an error.

So the reply wasn't "I disagree with you about the number of gods." The reply was "you've spelled god wrong," which only works as a sentence if monotheism is so thoroughly the default setting that a plural reads as a keyboard slip rather than a belief.

That's the bit. Not hostility – I don't think there was any. Just the quiet, completely unexamined assumption that there's one correct number of gods and I'd fumbled it.

I said, more or less, that I wasn't going to argue theology, that I'm a polytheist, that he's a monotheist, and could he not push it on me. Reasonable, I thought. A bit clipped, maybe.

Apparently I Was Meant to Have Filed the Paperwork

What came back was longer, and this is the part I've actually been chewing on since.

He wasn't pushing it on me, he said. I could have let him know I was polytheistic. The extra information wasn't needed. If I don't want people debating against me, I should just be expressive about my beliefs – and next time someone says what he said, I should simply tell them what I believe, because they won't understand at first, like he didn't.

Read that back slowly, because there's a sleight of hand in it that took me a second sitting to properly clock.

I said "thank the gods." That was the disclosure. The plural was the entire message. There is no more expressive way to indicate that I believe in more than one god than to refer, out loud, in public, to more than one god.

The information wasn't missing. It was received, parsed, judged incorrect, and returned with an asterisk on it.

And then, having failed to read the thing as written, the recommendation is that I be clearer next time. That the fix lives on my end. That going forward I ought to append a little disclosure note to my own vocabulary so that nobody accidentally tries to correct me – which is, functionally, a request that I explain myself in advance for the crime of using my own words in my own comment.

I don't owe anyone that paperwork. I didn't walk into his comments and ask him to declare his theology before I'd engage with him. He walked into mine, misread a plural as an error, and the fix on offer was that I should have pre-filed the correct answer somewhere he'd have seen it. That's not a request for clarity. That's a request that the burden of avoiding this exchange sit permanently with the person least responsible for causing it.

For context, my TikTok profile is blank. No bio, no links, nothing. The only route to any idea of who I am is to search my username and find everything else I've ever put on the internet, which is not a thing you'd expect anyone to do before replying to a comment about secondary school. So the version of me he was talking to was, by design, just a username and a sentence.

I'd rather it stayed that way. The alternative – the one being proposed – is that people from minority faiths wear a label, permanently, so that nobody has to do the small work of taking a sentence at face value.

A Smaller Version of the Same Thing

Worth saying what the video actually was, because it isn't incidental. It was about secondary school – specifically about the years where it felt like most of the year group had decided they didn't like me, for reasons that were never fully explained to me at the time and probably wouldn't have held up if they had been. That's the thing I was commenting on. That's what "thank the gods I'm out of education" was actually about.

And then, underneath that exact video, a stranger arrived to tell me I'd got a word wrong, that the fault was mine for not explaining myself first, and that next time I should know to pre-empt people like him. It's a small thing next to a school year deciding you're the problem, and I'm not going to pretend the two are the same size. But it's the same shape. It's someone deciding, without asking, that they understand my situation better than I do, and that the correct response to that misunderstanding is for me to adjust.

I didn't go looking for a lecture on how to talk about my own beliefs. I went looking for absolutely nothing – I left a comment on a video about a bad few years, and the reply I got was someone using it as an opening to tell me how to be, which is more or less the exact mechanism the video itself was about.

It's a Public Platform, Not His Living Room

The other thing that sits under all of this: TikTok is not a private conversation between two people who've agreed on a shared frame of reference beforehand. It's about as public and as global as a platform gets – billions of people, every religion practised on earth, every none-of-the-above besides. Nobody who posts a comment there has signed up to have it read against one specific theological default.

Treating "god" as a typo only works if monotheism is the assumed baseline for everyone reading, which it isn't, not on a platform like that and not anywhere, really. He wasn't lecturing me in a space that was his to set the terms of. He was doing it in a comments section under a stranger's video, on an app used by a genuinely enormous and varied slice of the planet, and the correction still arrived as though the whole place ran on his assumptions by default.

That's not a neutral mistake. That's what it looks like when someone's used to their own worldview being the unmarked one – the setting nobody has to state because everyone's just supposed to already be working from it. A diverse public platform doesn't owe anyone that. Neither did I.

He said that outright, and I want to be fair to him here, because I think he meant it kindly.

The full shape of it was: I respect you, because you're my neighbour. Not your belief. But you. You have your own thoughts, feelings, personality.

It's a formulation I recognise. It's the same move as loving the sinner and hating the sin, sanded down and made friendly. The person gets kept. The thing the person actually organises their life around gets set outside, on the step, as a separate item.

The trouble is that it isn't a separate item. I set moon water out for Selene. I keep Samhain on the actual night, with offerings for the dead. I wear a pentacle most days the same unremarkable way anyone wears a cross. Those aren't opinions I hold alongside my personality; they're a substantial fraction of how I spend my evenings and what I think I'm doing here. Respecting me while explicitly not respecting that is a bit like respecting someone as a person but not their job, their family, or their weekends.

And it's a courtesy that only ever runs one direction. Nobody says it to the majority. Nobody separates a Christian into the man and his Christianity so that the man can be kept and the rest disposed of politely. The split gets offered to the person whose beliefs are already treated as the optional extra.

The Blessing, and the Smirk

He signed off wishing me a blessed day or night, with a GIF of a girl glancing back over her shoulder, smirking.

I keep coming back to those two things sitting next to each other. The blessing is the gracious close – whatever you think of it, it's meant well, and it costs him nothing. The smirking GIF is the actual register: I've said my piece, I've been very reasonable about it, and I'm walking off having got the last word.

That's the tell, for me. Not malice. Just the small satisfaction of having explained something to someone, in a conversation where nothing was explained and nothing was learned.

And Then I Apologised

Here's the bit I'm not going to dress up, because leaving it out would make this a much more flattering post than it deserves to be.

I replied: "You too. I apologise, I just find TikTok can be quite annoying sometimes."

I apologised. To the person who'd asterisked my religion, told me the fault was in my failure to announce it, and separated me from my own practice as a favour.

If I'm being properly honest about what was happening underneath that reply, it wasn't grace. I didn't apologise because I'd reconsidered his point or softened toward him. I apologised because I wanted him gone. "You too, I apologise" was the fastest, least confrontational way to end the exchange, and what I actually meant, underneath the politeness, was closer to fuck off. The apology was the socially acceptable translation of that.

I've written before about a man outside my local train station who pushed a pamphlet into my hand – not offered, pushed – and how I took it because refusing would have cost more than accepting, then binned it round the corner the second I was out of his eyeline. That was the same move. Take the thing, be pleasant about it, dispose of it privately, don't make a scene in public over something that isn't worth a scene.

It's a rational trade every single time you make it. It's also how a thing like this stays invisible. Every one of those little accommodations is a person deciding, correctly, that the argument isn't worth having today – and the cumulative effect is that nobody involved ever finds out it was an argument at all. He walked away from that exchange having been apologised to. As far as he knows, it went fine.

This post is me not binning it round the corner.

I'm also aware, writing this out properly rather than just stewing on it, that the whole exchange was probably bait – that he said the one word knowing exactly what kind of reply it would fish for, and I obliged. That's plausible. People do that, especially in the replies of a video that's already got some churn on it. I don't think it changes anything I've written above, though. Whether he meant it as a genuine correction or as a hook to get a reaction out of a stranger, the actual content of what he said still carries the same assumption – that "god" singular was the default and the plural needed explaining. Falling for bait doesn't retroactively make the bait's premise correct. It just means I spent more energy on it than it deserved, which, well. Here we are.

What I Actually Wanted

Nothing, really, which is the frustrating part. There's no demand at the end of this.

I didn't want a debate. I said so at the time. I don't need anyone to accept that Selene is real or that the plural in my sentence was load-bearing. I'm not asking anyone to convert, or to reorganise their calendar, or to think about me at all.

I wanted "thank the gods" to be allowed to be a thing a person said, in a comment about hating school, without becoming an occasion.

That's the whole ask, and it's the same one I keep making in different words: the freedom to mark my own dates, use my own vocabulary, and be read literally when I'm being literal. Everyone else already has it. Nobody had to request it, because for them it was never in question – their gods are baked into the days of the week and the number on the calendar and the shape of the year, and none of that ever gets an asterisk.

One character, from a stranger, on a video I've already forgotten. That's genuinely all it was.

It just wasn't a typo. And he doesn't get to barge into my comment section, misread my own words back at me, and then hand me the admin work of making sure it doesn't happen again. That's not correction. That's entitlement wearing a blessing.