"How do I Look?"

Going into this assignment, I was not sure what my expectations were, on the one hand, it’s not like I go around all day lying or spewing insults everywhere, but on the other hand, I definitely have the tendency to think as I speak rather than before. My vague expectations were met with similarly vague observations, I did not notice any huge changes in the nature of my interactions with others, but there were a few times where I stopped myself thinking “is this comment absolutely necessary? Is it 100% grounded in truth? Will it make everyone around me feel good?” and this definitely changed individual exchanges.

The most stressful part of this task for me was when my roommate popped the dreaded “how do I look?” question (or something like that)… now of course she looked fine, my roommate is a very pretty, fit person, who can never really look bad in anything. I could give her my usual “yessssss girl you look amazinggggg”, but to be honest, the other outfit she was deciding between looked even better, in my opinion. Now saying exactly that would be useful and true, but would it be kind? Even though I would mean no harm-- and I know she prefers honesty (as do I) when the dreaded “does this make me look fat” issue arises-- everyone has insecurities, and no one wants to hear “that outfit isn’t the best one I’ve seen you wear”, because I know at least for me, all I hear is “you look bad” whether that was the intention or not. This made me think about the difference between the three words “kind”, “useful”, and “true”, because in this context they all had very different meanings. If I told Kayla I’d never seen her look better, it would be untrue, and not very useful, as I would be withholding information that could make her look even better, if I was keeping her from putting on an even better outfit, was it really kind? But if I told her I liked the other outfit better, I risked making her insecure about outfit #1, causing more harm than good, which in turn proves itself not super useful either. Kayla’s confused look meant I let this socially awkward pause go on too long (although I do this often so she probably didn’t think much of it), and settled on answering with “yeah it’s super cute, but what if you switched those jeans for the other ones”. As you can imagine, a similar paradox arose when my boyfriend asked, “are you annoyed at me”, because of course I was, but it was for something stupid, and holding it over him felt un-useful and unkind.

Another issue that arose over the day was that I tend to be an exaggerator, I have a caricature of a personality, so I often find myself telling caricaturized versions of stories, never to the point of changing the nature of the story or making it untrue, just enough to help those around me understand how exciting/funny/confusing/stressful the situation was to me—someone who tends to process things in a very extreme way. I find this interesting, because this almost serves as a way for me to bridge the gap between myself and others, as I suffer from a lot of anxiety, and often process things in ways that are hard for those around me to understand. In this sense, these exaggerations are useful, but I came to realize they were more so useful when I plugged in a “to me, it seemed like *insert caricature here*”, as then it was both true, and helped them to understand not only how I processed something, but how the way I process things is different from how they might.

Overall, I found this assignment interesting, because it made me really think about how what I said affected others. Often, it is not straightforward whether any one exchange is kind, useful, and true; sometimes, a statement is two of the three, or is kind to one person, useful to another, but in unkind or un-useful to a third. The point here I suppose is that there is a kind of triaging that happens to determine the cost-benefit model of each statement in terms of kindness, usefulness, and truth, for every person involved, and for something to be worthwhile it should prove positive in as many aspects as possible, to as many people involved as possible, or communicating it cannot be justified.