Imagine you’re in a grocery store, perusing the selection of the newly in-season strawberries. It’s easy to pick the fresh strawberries from the less fresh ones: which ones are bruised? Which ones look like they could get moldy soon? Which ones are too red, which aren’t quite red enough? The snap judgments you make about these are low stakes. They’re only strawberries, after all.
You continue on through the aisles of your grocery store, making judgments about the foods you need and do not need more and more frequently. As you gently push your cart past the frozen food aisle, you catch a glimpse of a person selecting various containers of ice cream. They’re in flip flops and a stained t-shirt, and as far as you can tell, they probably wear bigger pants than you. You’ve selected ice cream like this person hundreds of times, but in this moment, this person is different from you. Of course they’re getting ice cream, you think to yourself, they’re fat. Ice cream is probably all they eat anyways.
The judgments you made about the quality of strawberries just moments earlier have now grown into judgments about people you know nothing about. You think nothing of this, as you probably do it all the time. They are thoughts that hold little weight for you because they’re “usual.” Maybe they’re things you heard your parents say when you were growing up, or things you talk about with your coworkers at lunch or your friends when you’re out for drinks. Perhaps it’s even self-preservation: if I judge the actions and appearances of a stranger at face value, I don’t have to take the time to judge myself.
The reality is, everybody does this, whether they like to admit it or not. I’m not requesting that you stop these thoughts that you have about other people, but rather that you question them when they come up. Easier said than done, I know. But let me give you an example.
I am a yoga teacher. Body positivity is part of both my personal and professional life, but I still battle snap decisions I make about myself and others daily—a result of insecurities I’m, ironically, insecure about. A long time ago, at the very, very beginning of teaching, I had a yoga student who appeared as if fitness wasn’t necessarily part of their daily routine—a judgment I made about them by looking at them for one second as they walked through the door. They were shy, and they placed their mat far from mine in the room...Long story short, they kicked major ass every moment of the yoga class. Ashamed of my initial judgment of this person, I decided to approach them after class and tell them how strong and awesome they were, only to find out that this person had been crowned the champion of Ironman triathalons several times and was training to do it again. I hold this story close to my heart, and think of this incredible student every time my instincts tell me to judge someone based on how they look.
This doesn’t just go for size, either. When I was in high school, my mom and I went to an early morning fitness class where we often saw a woman who had clearly done her hair and makeup specifically for her workout. She would spend the class fixing her hair in the mirror between exercises, and we would roll our eyes at her. Here we were, greasy haired and makeup-less, assuming that this woman thought she was better than us. One day, the woman stayed a moment after class to work on a simple exercise. We made eye contact with her and she smiled and said “this exercise is so hard for me, I don’t think my form is right. I’m just trying to work on improving and getting stronger.” My mother and I were baffled—we had assumed this woman was there to show off. She was really there to get stronger, just like us.
The judgments we make about other people before we know them well, or even speak to them, are almost always incorrect. You may judge a person’s weight before you learn that they’re 100 pounds lighter than they were last year, or think a person isn’t as smart as you because they’re too pretty or too blonde or their clothes are too expensive before you learn that they spend their free time researching cures for epileptic seizures in small children using financial grants from their colleagues at Harvard. The next time you feel the need to make a judgment about someone else, or you hear someone you know and love commenting on someone they don’t know, I encourage you to ask one question: Why? Why do you think that? What makes you believe that that’s true...and how would you feel if someone made the same judgments about you?
Challenge it, and then challenge yourself to change it. Keep an open mind for the humans in your world, and leave your snap judgments for strawberries.
-mk
