Perception of Others

I met my senior 2 days ago and as usual we talked about people we knew. He mentioned my former roommate and said that she is that kind of girl everyone would love to be with but does not have the courage to pursue, because of her elegance, class and of course her standards. Whoever got her would be someone of that class and standard. On the other hand he mentioned another girl whom many guys would probably pursue, because she is ‘very easy to get’.

I could not agree more with him. If you know my former roommate you would know what I mean. She is such a lovely girl who cannot step out of the room without a nice pair of earrings. She appreciates literature and language. She speaks prefect English and always attempts to improve her Mandarin. She loves pastel colours. She loves God. Whereas the other girl is the opposite. She dresses up very well, but too often showing off her body figure too much. She behaves differently depending on she is with guys or girls. As a girl, I don’t like her, at all.

How we carry ourselves sets how we want other to perceive us. That consists of the clothes we wear, the way we walk and talk, the content of our conversation with others. Nowadays we are bombarded with the behaviours of certain celebrities such as party animals, sleeping around (the more the merrier), exposed private parts, vulgar language (did I tell that I really can’t stand that F word? not only it is vulgar, it is too much overused!!) so on and so forth. Sometimes we are so caught in the grey area. Maybe things are not that serious, come on we don’t do things they do, but indirectly we are influenced by the culture. For example, the overused words. F and S are the most common ‘cliche’, people are using them without thinking about their original definition. Two other very common ones are ‘like’ and ‘OMG’. Try making a sentence using this two words, it will turn out to be ‘I was like OMG~’.

Perhaps you might think that is very western, how about an Asian example. I found many girls strive to speak in a childlike tone (‘manja’ is a more suitable word to describe), especially when that person is a guy. If you pay a little bit more attention to it, you will find the similarities between these girls and those girls in the Taiwanese variety show. It is not wrong to have a high pitch and childlike tone, some people have it naturally, but to fake it out, I don’t think that works. Of course another extreme example is the ‘ME’ album in Facebook with full of pictures taken from high angle, usually the emphasis is on the eyes and sometimes you might see different hand signals. (the infamous 1 to 5 fingering technique, remember?). Now we have got another popular album, the party and clubbing pictures which show all the bottles and smoke. I am just saying if the boss is one of their friends, how would the boss think (since people don’t really remember who are in their friend list)?

Some people might say, who are you to judge? I am just being my true self. Of course I am nobody to judge, but everyone of us has something called self-control. We can choose what kind of true self we want to be, we can choose what we want others to perceive us as. How much respect we have for ourselves, it shows from how well we carry ourselves.