Every time I hang out with my friend Isabel she reminds me of the day we met.
Move in weekend at Whitworth University and I was all alone. So at breakfast I walked up to a group of girls sitting at a table and asked to eat with them. That is without doubt the boldest I have ever been. The way Isabel tells it I said, “you seem cool, can I sit with you?” Sounds like something I would say.
Thus starting three years of us both wanting to be friends and being entirely too intimidated by each other to actually be friends.
I was not wrong in my assessment. Isabel is one of the coolest people I have ever met. She would say such smart things in classes I was too afraid to even speak in, her outfits always looked amazing, she danced and was in main stage productions, and she had this way about her that made guys just fall in love with her. I was none of those things. In fact, how cool Isabel was was a topic of conversation a little too often in my primary friend group. We all had great big friend crushes on her and did not know how to bridge that gap.
Because of my perception of myself I was sure Isabel and I would never be friends. I remember being shocked one Jan-term when she invited me over to watch a movie, we didn’t even have any classes together at the time.
During the summer between our Junior and Senior years that I learned that Isabel had a similar perception of me that made her just as intimidated by me as I was by her.
“You were so quiet and you exuded this sort of confidence. Like you did what you wanted to do and didn’t care what others thought and if you didn’t want to do something you didn’t do it.”
Wow!
I think about that sometimes when my anxiety and depression grows a voice of its own and starts telling me terrible things. My perception of myself is very different. Sure, I do what I want even if no one wants to do it with me but I also think that no one wants to do it with me. I know my IQ is 125 but I try to keep my mouth shut because I do not have the luxury of editing the stupid out of the things I say. I wanted to be more like Isabel and, it turns out, she wanted to be more like me… or at least our perceptions of each other.
We’re friends now, like actual friends, she was the person I called crying in an airport the first time I felt my heart shatter. Those perceptions we had of each other still hold true but with a better 3D image of who the other one is now. I think that is important. What others think of us isn’t supposed to matter but it does. The people we see as intimidating don’t see all of the things in our brains that we think makes us no good, they just see how we behave. And those perceptions have so much more to do with the person seeing than the person being seen.
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