Jumper: White Stuff. Skirt: White Stuff via eBay. Boots: Duo via eBay. Necklace: made by me
I was thinking over the weekend about personality and how much of it we really project. In my case, I suspect large chunks of it don’t come out large chunks of the time.
For example, the one aspect of my personality I always feel I can never get down in prose is my sense of humour. It’s hard to write comedy, for me, and my brand of humour tends to be conversational – I’ll make a passing observation or carry an idea to a surreal conclusion (family trait, me and my brother can spin a passing thought to impressive lengths) all the time but writing a funny blog post or story is something I’ve always felt is a beyond me. Odd that I seem to end up being fairly serious and thoughtful on here all the time considering how much I laugh and make other people (well, the ones that listen to me – I often feel a bit other at work, somehow…) laugh during the day.
I suppose work is one of those places where a lot of people aren’t quite their whole selves. I’d never say I’m not me, but I’m the tiniest fraction of me, really, and I’m pretty sure that nearly all my colleagues know bugger about me. I suppose I don’t volunteer any more than they ask, but it’s interesting when you find that someone has formed a completely erroneous opinion of you based on… well, nothing more than appearance and a mainly professional interaction. Step forward the person that had somehow concluded that I was a prude despite the fact we’ve never had a non-work related conversation longer than a couple of minutes and he’s not someone that listens to what people say and how they say it anyway. Same conversation, though, revealed that a colleague with whom I don’t have cause to interact much had noted and remembered a passing Facebook reference to FFVII and was therefore much less surprised than some that I’d been quietly playing the game they were all on about too.
Same thing with me having a few drinks. I was no more than tipsy at most – work do, after all, and I’m management and all the Directors were present – but unsurprisingly I was livelier than they were used to seeing me – what with me being off the clock and not talking about work and all. So, it was commented on the next day with some surprise. I mean really – is that so astonishing?
It’s strange. I feel like I don’t reveal such a large proportion of my personality and thoughts at work and online – to any one group, really, with the exception of my few very closest friends, who know most of me – and I kind of figured everyone does likewise, to a greater or lesser degree. So I don’t really get why folk make assumptions about what their colleagues or less well know acquaintancey folk are like, or indeed would like or not like, if there’s simply an absence of information.
Odd.
I don’t think it’s making assumptions, exactly, as forming impressions – and yes, impressions are wildly misleading in especially a work context, where as you say, none of us are our whole selves. So, everyone *should* be conscious that the impressions we form of colleagues are unreliable, and rationally possibly everyone is, but… well, that’s the power of impressions. A picture is formed, less than consciously, and if new information comes in that substantially changes that picture, it’s a bit of a shock.
In your case I’d guess that your ladylike dress style, plus quiet demeanour (I think – I’ve only met you the once), plus maybe known knitting habit, sketch an “OLDFASHIONED” outline… all the more fun to colour that outline in with a bit of shocking pink! Or, well. You get the idea.
(And humour is particularly tricky to get down on page, yes. I keep reading interviews with Famous People where the writer raves about how funny the interviewee is; yet it never, ever comes across to the reader.)
Agree with you, when you put it like that. What fascinates me really is the way someone that’s interacted with me almost daily for several years can have such a skewed view of me while someone with whom I basically have a tea-round-and-Facebook relationship knows me better. Or that someone could say ‘we’re really different’ without us knowing each other well enough to really, well, know that. One thing to form an impression, another to assume it must be true or to never revise it based on actual interaction, you know?
Mind you, the person I am at least partly taking about has expressed surprise several times that I wear contact lenses – new news to him each time it comes up – so I suspect he’s just not very perceptive!