Jessica Lynn

I’m not the type of person who makes new friends very easily. I don’t really feel comfortable starting up conversations and most of the time I don’t even want to. Mostly this is because of one of two reasons: either I’m being judgemental and I’ve decided I don’t want to be friends with the person or people in question, or I’m honestly just too shy to make the effort. This mostly leads to people leaving with the impression that I’m the biggest bitch in the world. While this may be true, ususally this bitchiness doesn’t truly reveal itself unless you know me very well or you’ve just pissed me off/offended me. Recently I’ve been working on this, though, and I owe a lot of it to one person in particular- Michelle. I’ve known Michelle for probably close to a year now and we’ve only recently become friends. When I first met her I pretty much wrote her off as just another typical ditzy girl who I would never be able to deal with for an extended period of time, let alone be friends with. But just by being the tiniest bit open minded about her, I’ve come to see that we’re a lot alike. Yes, she can be a ditz, but I’ve found that I can be too. We’ve become pretty close now and she’s a really good friend to have. It’s helped me realize that I’ve been doing to people what I’ve resented having done to me- I’d been judging them based on first impressions which are almost always wrong.

No one is 100% themselves 100% of the time. Bad things happen. You wake up in a shitty mood. Something depressed you. You’re dog just died. Basically, you’re not always going to meet people when they’re feeling their best and it’s not fair to hold that against them after just one interaction. Tonight I hung out with a group of people who I’ve met a few times and thought they were the biggest douche bags, and I still somewhat hold that opinion of them because of a lot of their views on things, but I saw a completely different side of them tonight. They were friendly and could actually carry out normal conversations throughout the night. Now I’m not saying that I think they’re great people now, but it made me realize that I’d been so focused on my own judgements that I never gave them a chance to show me anything other than what other people said about them and my few meetings with them. And also that no matter how many times you meet someone, you can never know everything about them. It just made me reconsider the way I handle social situations.

I don’t know how many possible friendships I’ve missed out on because I decided to write someone off for a single flaw I labled “unforgiveable”, but I do know that I’m working on being better. This also means that I’m going to have to open up a bit more. I give off this hard, bitchy impression because I really don’t like revealing anything else. It’s uncomfortable and awkward. But again, it’s something to work on.