Heart to Heart: On first impressions and self-definition

In her column “Heart to Heart,” Audrey Tomlin explores the interpersonal connections that make us human. She aims to understand how love, in all of its forms – friendship, familial, romantic – shapes our lives. 

Last week, over brunch, my friends and I tried to recall the first time we met. It was upsetting how little we remembered. If I press my memory, I can recall moments from my first few days here — gathering on a new friend’s floor late on the second night to discuss dorm drama, laughing because the boy next to me procured a full-sized bottle of moisturizer out of his pocket during convocation — but I cannot recreate the feeling of meeting someone brand new and sparkling with unwritten potential. I can only see people as I see them now; my perception of the past is tainted by my current knowledge. I have forgotten what it meant to have an awkward, convenient friendship: to not really know each other, but rely on each other nonetheless. 

I think it’s strange how well I feel I understand some people when, really, it’s been two months. In my free time, I like to examine the dichotomy between my unrefined first interactions with friends and our astounding closeness after eight quick weeks, between casually asking for a new acquaintance’s phone number and crying on a friend’s dorm carpet. I don’t know where one phase of friendship began and the other ended. I’ve tried to draw a line, and all I can find is a blurry transition space that perhaps we are still in.

I’ve decided the flip side is that my new friend’s proximity to me must have changed over this period, too. Perhaps they also feel that they know me as they know their hometown in autumn, and they don’t, they can’t. Not because I’ve hidden myself, but just because nobody can dissect a person in two months. Still, I would like to know precisely how others view me. Still, just once, I would like to be a stranger peering in at myself.

In high school, I had an obsession with asking friends to describe me. I read once that a person you met 10 minutes ago knows you better than you know yourself. The logic, I think, is that we view ourselves through a microscope: we can see the individual molecules we are made of, but we cannot see the whole picture; we do not know what these molecules combine to create. A stranger can observe us through an objective lens in a way that we ourselves cannot. I framed myself in these terms: the de-emphasis of my own internal perspective, the overemphasis on outside opinion.

At the same time, I was acutely aware that I could not accurately describe my closest friends. I could tell them that they were kind or smart or funny, but I could not capture the specific scent that lingered on all of their belongings or the exact motion they would make when they were stressed. Either I did not know them well enough to capture their essence in sentence form, or I knew them too well; I, too, was viewing them through a microscope.

I was obsessed with defining myself, too. I thought that because I was messy and undefined, because I couldn’t describe myself and my friends couldn’t either, it might be easier if I carefully folded my identity up and tucked myself into a shoe box with crisply creased edges. I sought to create a character out of myself based on a set of clear statements: “I like running. I hate bananas. I like writing. I can’t do math.” I learned to break myself down into small, digestible pieces. I blurred the line between knowing myself and arbitrarily labeling myself. I confused the divinity of true self-understanding with the raw human urge to self-define.

Maybe the lesson is simply that first impressions are often wrong, and we do not fully know anybody, least of all ourselves. I’ve seen wonderful friendships grow from the weeds of fear and self-doubt and judgment. I’ve lived the other way as well; I’ve watched people I thought I could spend a lifetime with rot before my eyes. 

In an earlier version of this essay, I wanted to say that the opposite is true, too. “Sometimes, people are nothing like they appear, and sometimes, they are exactly as they appear. We are all paradoxically so much more than they let on, and also, at times, exactly what we let on,” I wrote. I wanted to ground the statement in evidence that I had seen both sides: that I had judged someone from inception, from first glance, first wave, first word, and that I had given them a second chance only for them to prove me right. I could not find the proof, though. Either I am constantly learning new information about my friends or my friends are perpetually evolving.

What I mean to say is not that first impressions do not matter, but rather, that they are just that: a first, a starting point, and not the destination. Sometimes a first means everything, and sometimes it means almost nothing at all, and sometimes it means everything until you allow someone a second chance and they prove you wrong. We are terrible judges of character even, and perhaps especially, of our own character. I’ve never understood another, not after a sentence, not after two months, not after a lifetime. It’s frustrating to think that we cannot quantify a person, that we may never know a person, that we cannot bring any one person to life through sentence construction. But I’ve decided that there’s divinity, or at least freedom, in allowing ourselves not to know.

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