Mama always said, "You've only got one chance to make a first impression, and you want it to be good."

Depending on when or where you meet me, you'd see completely different girls. I have my pageant girl, who is all dolled up and looks flawless. My DnD (Dungeons and Dragons) girl, who is geeky and eats pizza while slitting people's throats in bar fights. My student girl, who is hard working and overachieving and will not accept anything below an "A." I have my tough girl, which goes up as soon as I start to develop feelings for someone, etc. There's so many sides of me to be seen, and after getting to know my friends, I've come to realize that first impressions aren't that important.

They're a facade of what the person wants you to see. When I'm backstage at a pageant I don't normally mention that I have a DnD group that meets weekly, and vice versa. As people slowly start to open up, you get to know those things about one another and you realize that your first impression is a 2D person that doesn't really exist - at least in my cases.

I've noticed that while I can usually sense whether or not a person and I will get along, I don't know who they are. I've come to realize that I don't usually get that 2D person right anyway, and who wants to be friends with the static characters in a book? There are, as my friend call them, vibes that you get off of people that tell you a little, but to be honest, how can you truly understand someone until you've taken the time to actually get to know them?

As someone who struggles with judging, I oftentimes think the worst of someone in order to help myself desynthetize to what I'm feeling. In fact, it's happened recently to where I just stuck with a first impression that was completely wrong and ended up ruining something before it even started. I think in order to get to know someone, you have to push past what you first believed about that same person, and instead try to realize that it's not hard to imagine a pageant girl in sweats eating pizza while talking about "Critical Role" (which is an online game of Dungeons and Dragons that comes on every Thursday). So, why should I be continually surprised by someone who has proven themselves of being capable of being a great person, even though the first meeting wasn't so great?

First impressions are hard. In a society that thrives off of instant gratification and needing validation at the moment, I feel like we've taken a huge step backward from getting to know people. I'm not just a pageant girl. I'm not just a DnD player. I'm not just a 4.0 student. I'm not just a facade I put off when I first people. I'm all of those things. But your first impression might be skewed, because apparently, it's not normal for a pageant girl to enjoy rolling dice with some other nerds on a Saturday night.