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A Night On The Town

The other night I was going to an informal gathering where I knew very few people. As I was choosing my clothes I noticed that my thoughts were on what to wear to make the best impression. And I had to start questioning myself about this. Now don't get me wrong here, there is a time to dress for making an impression, such as going for a job interview. However was this one of those times?

I stopped what I was doing and took a few minutes to do a check-in with myself. What was I trying to accomplish here? Well, I wanted to have a fun evening, meet new people, and maybe forge a new friendship or two. Did I need to dress in a certain way to have fun and make new friendships? As I took a couple of deep breaths the answer came to me. I wasn't doing this for the people I was going to meet; I was doing this so I wouldn't feel rejected. I was doing this in order to be comfortable with myself.

We spend a lot of time trying to make the right impressions to get approval, respect and to be liked by others. But are we really? How many of these times are we actually just trying to approve of, respect, and like ourselves? How is it that we expect others to give to us or see in us what we are not giving to and seeing in ourselves?

After more consideration I realized that in the moment that I had the thought that I had to do something particular so as not to be rejected I was rejecting myself. It was my belief that I had to dress a certain way to make an impression, not the people I would be meeting that evening. Before I had even dressed for the evening I had done to myself what I was avoiding from others.

The moment we think that we have to do something in order to be approved of, respected, liked, loved, worthy, or whatever else we are rejecting ourselves. That very thought tells us that we believe we are not fine with how we are in that moment. And more importantly it's a lie. It's a story we have concocted, usually to make sense of something hurtful that happened in the past and we adopted a belief about it in order to not feel hurt again. We have no proof that the same situation is happening or about to happen. While this was a great mechanism when we were kids so as not to do the same things to get into trouble over and over again, is it working for us in adulthood? I decided it wasn't working for me.

With that I noted my story and got up and went back to my closet and chose some old comfy clothes that I liked and felt physically comfortable in. I got dressed and stood in front of the mirror, smiled, grabbed my coat and left. I had a great time that evening and I even came home with the phone number of a new friend!

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