I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you

  [pri-zuhmp-shuh n]  Show IPA

noun

1. the act of presuming.
2. assumption of something as true.
3. something that is presumed; an assumption.
 
 
Once, I was watching television with my cousin and a commercial for the Bedazzler came on. He chuckled a little and said 
 
“I could totally see that being something your mom would love.”
 
I turned to him with deep incredulity and marveled at his complete and utter misapprehension of my mother as a human person. This is a woman who shines, indeed, but with a beauty entirely made in nature. She does not wear makeup, she leaves her hair gyspy wild, she utterly lacks the trappings of vanity; she does not bling. Ever.
 
As I was growing up I noticed this tendency to misunderstand my mother all the time. People would meet her, and her open and candid nature seemed to create this sense in people that they saw the entirety of her. That because she would readily reveal things about herself that other people would only imagine disclosing at the most extreme depths of intimacy, that there couldn’t possibly be anything about her that they did not know. They would arrive at absurd and erroneous conclusions utterly convinced of their accuracy.
 
And though I am profoundly different from my mother in many many ways, I have inherited both her candor and the concomitant tendency to attract faulty surmise.
 
It is tempting, sometimes irresistible, to decide we have answers when in fact, we have none. The provocation to assume increases as what we reckon ought to be so drifts further from what occurs in fact. Yet it is unfailingly so that like a warped looking glass, these spurious inferences cast reflection only on the conjurer and never upon their object. 
 
To anyone with the arrogance to believe you have understood me; be assured you could not possibly. You have neither the capacity nor the data. If it is reassuring to think me wrong, well, far be it for me to deprive you of your comforts.