In her column ‘Heart to Heart’, Audrey Tomlin explores the interpersonal connections that make us human. She wants to understand how love, in all its forms – friendship, family, romantic – shapes our lives.
Last week, over brunch, my friends and I tried to think back to the first time we met. It was disturbing how little we remembered. Pressing my memory, I can recall moments from my first few days here – meeting late on the second night on a new friend’s floor to discuss the dorm room drama, laughing because the boy next to me had a large bottle of moisturizer from the cupboard. his pocket during the convocation – but I can’t recreate the feeling of meeting someone brand new and brimming 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’ve forgotten what it meant to have an awkward, easy friendship: not really knowing each other, but still relying on each other.
It’s strange to me how well I feel like I understand some people, even though it’s actually been two months. In my spare time, I like to explore the dichotomy between my unrefined first interactions with friends and our astonishing bond after eight fast 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 another ended. I’ve tried to draw a line, and all I can find is a blurry transitional space that we might still be in.
I’ve decided that the downside is that my new boyfriend’s proximity to me must also have changed during this time. Maybe they also feel like they know me like they know their hometown in the fall, and they don’t, they can’t. Not because I have hidden myself, but simply because no one can dissect a person in two months. Still, I would like to know exactly how others see me. Still, for once I would like to be a stranger peering at myself.
In high school I had an obsession with asking friends to describe me. I once read that someone you met ten minutes ago knows you better than you do. The logic, I think, is that we look at ourselves through a microscope: we can see the individual molecules that make us up, but we can’t see the whole picture; we don’t know what these molecules combine to create. A stranger can observe us through an objective lens in a way that we cannot ourselves. I have framed myself in these terms: the de-emphasis on my own internal perspective, the over-emphasis on outside opinions.
At the same time, I was acutely aware that I couldn’t accurately describe my best friends. I could tell them they were nice, smart, or funny, but I couldn’t capture the specific scent that lingered on all their belongings, or the precise movement they made when they were stressed. Either I didn’t know them well enough to express their essence in sentence form, or I knew them too well; I also looked at them through a microscope.
I was also obsessed with defining myself. I thought that because I was messy and undefined, because I couldn’t describe myself and neither could my friends, maybe it would be easier if I carefully folded my identity and put myself in a shoebox with sharply creased edges. I tried to create a character out of myself based on a series of clear statements: “I love 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 need to define oneself.
Perhaps the lesson is simply that first impressions are often wrong, and that we don’t fully know anyone, least of all ourselves. I have seen beautiful friendships grow from the weeds of fear, doubt, and self-judgment. I have also lived the other way around; I’ve seen people who I thought I could spend a lifetime with rot in front of my eyes.
In an earlier version of this essay I wanted to say that the opposite is also true. “Sometimes people are not at all as they seem, and sometimes they are exactly as they seem. Paradoxically, we are all so much more than we let on, and sometimes exactly what we let on,” I wrote. I wanted to back up the statement with evidence that I had seen both sides: that I had judged someone from the beginning, from the first sight, the first wave, the first word, and that I had given them a second chance just so they could prove that I was right. However, I couldn’t find the proof. Either I’m constantly learning new information about my friends, or my friends are constantly evolving.
What I mean to say is not that first impressions don’t matter, but 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, and sometimes it means everything until you give someone a second chance and they prove you wrong. Even, and perhaps especially, we are terrible judges of our own character. I have never understood anyone else, not after a punishment, not after two months, not after a lifetime. It’s frustrating to think that we can’t quantify a person, that we may never know a person, that we can’t bring any person to life through sentence construction. But I’ve decided that there is divinity, or at least freedom, if we allow ourselves not to know.
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