Every day I walk the same route to and from class, to and from my room and so on.
Every day someone else is also walking that same route.
Do I notice them? Of course. But do I acknowledge them? No, unfortunately.
Every day we walk past the same people and we know the faces, but we don’t know the names.
Most importantly, we don’t know their stories.
It’s crazy to think that although we all coexist on the same small campus and small world, we don’t bother to go up to somebody new that we see every day and introduce ourselves.
It’s like I’ve known that one girl that I walk past every day on my way to Calculus for my whole life, yet I don’t even know her name.
For all you know, you could be walking past a teen mom, someone who just went through a break-up, someone who was top of their class in high school or someone paying for their own college.
We walk past these people every day and they look like normal civilians at first glance, but they each have a beautiful and unique backstory.
So who are we? Well, we’re human. Plain and simple.
First impression judgement is so normal for humans.
We look at someone for the first time and immediately make an assumption about them.
Now this isn’t always done out of hatred, but everyone has done it because our mind thinks that that person is a certain way because of what we can see on the outside.
I know that I’ve definitely walked past someone and thought something that may not be true.
For example, if you walk past someone who’s hair is messy and you think, “Rough night for them, huh?” Little do you know, they might’ve been up all night due to their own internal struggles.
We are so quick to judge based on first glance when we don’t know the whole story.
This doesn’t make us evil, but it makes us human.
So who am I?
I’m a daughter, I’m a friend, I’m a former competitive dancer, I’m someone who has struggled with mental health, and I’m also funny(because my grandma thinks I am).
But if you walked past me on your way to class and saw me with my hair looking messy, head down and AirPods blasting, you would make an assumption about me too.
We can’t judge until we know a person’s full story.
But that’s what makes us so beautiful as humans too. We each have a different life, a different background, different ethnicity, different story.
And in my opinion, that is such a gift.
Life is such a gift.
Being human is such a gift.