Who Asked? // How important are first impressions?

Hello, readers. I’m Brynn, and there’s a dead cat in my basement. 

Crazy first impression, right? There’s a good chance you do not know who I am at all. So, since this is the first installment of my blog, your first thought of me is that I might be some psycho cat murderer, or at the very least bad at cleaning my basement. 

Now if I tell you that there is no dead cat in my basement and I was just trying to think of a clever hook, your impression of me changes. Maybe you think I’m a good writer, or a crappy one, depending on your personal preference. 

Or maybe you think I’m funny. Or dark. Or boring. It’s impossible for me to know, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are constantly giving people first impressions of ourselves and constantly creating snap judgments of those around us. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about first impressions recently as I interviewed prospective new writers for Pitt Tonight, Pitt’s best and only late night talk show. Sitting in a tiny Posvar classroom and asking a steady stream of people the same questions for hours at a time really forced me to confront what factors determined my final opinion of these candidates. 

Maybe one person seemed shy and another seemed overly outgoing, or someone looked at us weird, or someone didn’t seem to put as much effort into their application, or someone didn’t laugh at our jokes, or someone immediately shook our hands. All of these tiny factors crystallized into the opinions my fellow head writers and I formed. 

In this instance, first impressions were incredibly important. We didn’t have the opportunity to truly get to know these people, so we had to make decisions based on what were often incredibly minute or insignificant moments. First impressions determined whether or not they joined our staff, a situation ubiquitous in today’s job market. 

But beyond a position you’re applying for, where else do first impressions really count? How many relationships began purely on a first impression? How many moments in our life only came to pass because of the first thing we said to someone? Can we recover from making a truly awful first impression, or should we live in constant fear that any person on the street could be solidifying an eternal opinion based on our outfit? 

I’ll start by saying that I like to think I remember the first impressions I had for most of the important people in my life. I remember the first day of sixth grade and hearing my future best friend’s laugh from across the room. I remember meeting my current roommate in a suburban side-yard 13 years ago. I remember my first two boyfriends walking down the hall to our middle school cafeteria years before either would know my name, and I remember asking my sister about my now ex-boyfriend because I saw that he was on my class roster and in her grade. 

I remember my first Pitt Tonight bonding event and where everyone was sitting and what they were wearing. And for all of these people, I remember if I found them nice or funny or smart or mean. But the significance of having these memories is less about what I specifically thought of them in the moment and more that I remembered them at all. 

I called one of my closest friends “E. coli Girl” for most of my freshman year because she came to one club meeting, told us she had E. coli and then disappeared for a month. Another of my best friends made me feel silly for having a shirt from Target in seventh grade, and now she’s my fashion inspiration and favorite person to rant with. 

On the flip side, there are people who made great first impressions on me who turned out to be awful — people who I recommended to join clubs with me before realizing that they brought a crazy energy, or people that seemed so sweet, only to turn around and talk about me behind my back. 

At the end of the day, the truth is that we cannot fully rely on first impressions to predict what someone will mean to us or their inherent value as a person. Sometimes we hit the nail on the head — like when I trusted a guy I barely knew to walk me home from a party a year ago, and now I can’t imagine college without him — or we fall embarrassingly short, like all my friends and all of their exes ever. 

Plus, it’s not really going to change anything if we decide that first impressions really do hold so much weight. My fear of judgment extends far beyond the first impression someone has of me. I’ve spent so much of my life obsessing over what other people think of my decisions, of my outfits, of my hair, of my lovers and my career — obsessing over the perfect version of me that I want everyone to have in their heads. 

But the uncomfortable truth is that no one will get to see how truly awesome I am if I hold them at arm’s length, and if a lame first impression is enough to keep someone away forever, they were never truly meant to be in my life. 

So be yourself, don’t sweat the small stuff and trust your gut while remembering not to fully write someone off for an awkward encounter. I mean, I started this article claiming to have a dead cat in my basement, and you read all the way to the end. Must mean something, right?