The Familiar Frame
When I start a new painting, I don’t really see a blank canvas. Technically, it’s empty – just white space – but in my head, the picture already exists. The outlines, the colors, the tiny details no one else would notice but that bring the whole thing to life. It’s all there before I ever touch the paper.
Except, it’s not.
For a long time, I thought of myself that way too. I’d always felt fully sketched out, already understood. I grew up with the same faces year after year: family, hometown friends, neighbors, classmates. People who’d seen every version of me: chaotic toddler, questionable-fashion-choices tween, the teenage phase we don’t speak of. Even my camp friends, who I only saw once or twice a year, had known me long enough to fill in the blanks.
Because of that, I never felt like I had to prove who I was. If I showed up to school in ratty pajamas half-awake, or said something weird, or had an off day, it didn’t matter because everyone already knew the bigger picture. My identity wasn’t fragile. It had years of context holding it together.
I didn’t realize how comforting that was until I didn’t have it anymore.
Blank Space
Coming to college, everything shifted. As an out-of-state student from Chicago, I arrived knowing almost no one. To say it was isolating would be an understatement. I wasn’t used to not having multiple circles to turn to, much less just one, and suddenly, every interaction felt like a first impression I couldn’t undo.
Even before I stepped on campus, I felt it. I remember scrolling through Instagram trying to find a roommate, analyzing feeds like they were resumes. At the same time, I became painfully aware that people were doing the same to me. My profile was practically blank, and suddenly, that wasn’t “mysterious,” it was alarming. I was handing strangers an empty canvas and hoping they’d paint me correctly.
Too Much Color
So I overcompensated in the DMs. I wanted to sound funny, warm, put-together, effortlessly sociable – basically, the ideal future roommate. I’d rewrite messages five times, trying to compress my entire personality into a few sentences and emojis.
But it hit me: people weren’t meeting me. They were meeting whichever version I decided to send – and there was always the possibility that I wasn’t sending out the right one.
And the ambiguity of that, the reality that I could be flattened into a single moment, a single message, a single glance, terrified me. So I did the opposite of hiding: I revealed too much at once. Full painting, all at once, colors dumped on the canvas, hoping transparency would equal truth.
Spoiler: it didn’t.
Quick Sketches
It’s funny – in elementary and middle school, I used to plan my first-week outfits like it was Fashion Week. By sophomore year of high school, that energy was gone. I already knew everyone. They already knew me. I could roll into homeroom in pajamas and yesterday’s mascara and nobody would question whether I had my life together. They’d seen the days I did.
In college, no one had that archive.
Every time I left my dorm, it felt like I was meeting a new audience – one that couldn’t see the full picture; one I didn’t know what was being painted in their minds.
And that’s when I learned how much of college is built on snapshots. Thin-slice judgments, social psych calls them — the idea that people form impressions off of slivers of behavior, often before you even speak. I always thought identity was about who I knew I was. College taught me it’s also about who people think you are in the first ten seconds.
Layer by Layer
At first, I hated that. I wanted to correct every assumption, explain every nuance, make sure nobody filled in the blank canvas wrong. I thought being “authentic” meant offering the whole painting immediately: all the colors, all the stories, all the layers at once.
But letting someone see every corner of you without context isn’t vulnerability; sometimes, it’s misplaced exposure. It’s handing a stranger your entire sketchbook and hoping they don’t misinterpret a rough draft.
Somewhere between awkward dining-hall introductions, club icebreakers, and too many “Where are you from?” conversations, something clicked.
People aren’t judging because they’re cruel; they’re judging because they’re human. In a place where everyone is meeting dozens of new faces at once, nobody has the mental bandwidth to see your whole character arc on day one. A filter isn’t dishonesty, or a sign that someone is fake. It’s pacing.
So I stopped trying to dump the whole painting at once. I started sharing brushstrokes instead. A laugh here, a story there, a real moment when it felt earned, not pressured. I learned that it’s okay to keep some colors to yourself until you know who can appreciate them.
A Slow Becoming
Here’s what I didn’t expect: once I stopped trying to let everyone see “all of me” immediately, I actually felt more like myself. My actions felt more deliberate; I felt calmer. And even though I thought it would, it didn’t feel like hiding. It felt like giving things time to land.
These experiences have led to an unexpected realization: I don’t want to be fully understood right away. I just want to be understood accurately. The right people will get there, and I get to decide the pace. I no longer consider that being guarded; I see it as being thoughtful with who I am and how I share myself.
College didn’t reinvent me. It simply slowed me down, reminding me that being known is something that happens gradually, in small, careful strokes, like a painting taking shape. And I think there’s beauty in that pace.