SoCalScribe's Scandalous Scribbles

first impressions

PROMPT: Write about first impressions. Have you ever thought something about someone when you first met them and it was proved wrong?


I have, depending on how you look at it, the good fortune or misfortune of being an eternal optimist. I always like to believe in the best in people and - as a result - often find that my first impressions and initial opinions of people are wrong just as often as they're right. While I'm hard pressed to think of anyone in my life that I disliked and then later realized was a better person, I do have a very long list of people I liked and then realized were not people I wanted to associate with, let alone were anything like I originally thought them to be. Some of these people include:

A former boss with whom I got along with perfectly well until I found out she actively prevented me from getting a better job I interviewed for and - when I actually did leave the company - called my future boss and tried to convince them to rescind my job offer.

Two former roommates, one who resorted to nasty pranks (of the "clogged drain hairball on the toothbrush" variety) and effectively ended a decade-long friendship so he could move me out and his girlfriend into the apartment we shared (he could have just asked me to move out), and another who was more than happy to eat all the food I paid for (and assuming my stored leftovers were freely available), then bragged constantly about how much money she was saving by not wasting money on food.

Another former employer who encouraged my writing career by letting me spend weeks on pulling together a pitch to rewrite one of our screenplay projects myself... only to take all of that work, turn around, and give it to a more established screenwriter as "the company's" notes for what we wanted him to write on the project.

I don't necessarily harbor the same animosity toward these people that I once did... and some of them I even still talk to from time to time. But I started each of these relationships thinking the people involved were very different than these actions proved them to be. Even though I can be cordial toward all of them at this point, the way I view them is considerably different than my first impression led me to believe.

In his excellent book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, author Malcolm Gladwell makes a compelling case for first impressions and how we can discern a remarkable amount of accurate information about a person within only a few moments of meeting them. And I've certainly experienced that too, where I've met someone and received an initial impression that has yet to change in a meaningful way. But there are also times, as illustrated above, where I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they're basically good and decent people who wouldn't intentionally screw me over or hurt me... and I've been proven wrong.

As far as people for whom I've developed an unfavorable first impression and later changed my mind... I'm still thinking about that one. Perhaps part of the difficulty is that it's harder to win over someone you don't like than it is to lose respect for someone that you do. All it really takes is one really bad experience (see above) to turn a relationship sour, but it can take considerably longer and much more effort to win over someone who doesn't like you all that much.