You Don’t Know Me, So Don’t Judge Me

I should copyright that line. I wrote a song with that title back in my rapper days.

I’m serious – I wrote the lyrics to a song and composed it with a musician and, it gets better, a troupe of 8 of us performed this number on stage at an amateur theatre show for 2 weeks. I had backup singers and everything! Although, I wasn’t the lead singer, I was rapping, but none of that is the point of this post.

I was 21 at the time. Now, nine years later, this line still rings true. Humans are judgmental by nature. First impressions are paramount.

When I wrote that song I was angry about being constantly judged. I used to feel torn between the two distinct cultures I grew up in. My Aussie friends thought I was a conservative, sensible, homely Indian girl. On the other hand, my annual vacations to India had my relatives assuming I had seventeen boyfriends just because I lived in Australia and wore jeans all the time.

The worst part is I used to care so much about what people thought. Only recently have I become comfortable with myself the way I am. Maybe that comes with turning 30 (a recent event). However it seems to have also granted me a higher degree of snobbery. Now it’s as if I am on the other side, doing all the judging. Before I even meet people I form an opinion of them based on certain mannerisms.

For example, just last weekend, my husband and I hosted a dinner party and invited our friends over for 9pm. One couple (a friend introducing us to his new girlfriend) arrived at… wait for it… 11.45pm! Almost midnight! I was horrified. No excuses or apologies were given. Needless to say I’d already eaten by then. To top it off, earlier that day I had been texting the girl to ask what she’d like to drink. She gave no response to several of my texts.

Is it so wrong for me to judge given the outright lack of basic courtesy?

I think not. After all, I’m a stickler for punctuality and thank heavens there are people out there who agree with me.

However, I can’t help but feel there is wavelength problem going on with me. I’ve heard it gets harder to make friends as you get older, because you become more set in your ways and connect only with like-minded people. It’s not that I’m not trying; I’ve been out and about meeting new people a lot lately. But the people I’ve met seem to be so strange.

In a perverse kind of way which makes me never want to see them again.

(This makes me wonder if I am the one who is indeed strange; based on the theory ‘if you find something wrong with everyone else, perhaps the problem is within yourself’).

Anyhow, to prove my point, here are true examples of some people I’ve met lately:

• A girl who told me the most exciting thing she did all week was crack an egg open directly onto the fry pan. For the first time ever.
• A girl who first visited a nightclub at 26 years of age. Then proceeded to tell me how shocked she was at the following scenes she witnessed:

• An obligatory hen’s night invitation through a mutual friend presented me the torture of the following conversations, on top of enduring squealing 28 year olds who acted like they were going on 16:

Later that night:

• This one gets its own bullet point but it’s still about the hen’s night. They got a cock CAKE. I mean I can handle a regular naughty cake, I’ve seen plenty, but this one was a figure of a guy lying back in all his glory with a nude woman next to him, and the icing oozing out of the cake was – well, I need not say more.

So maybe turning 30 has made me more judgemental, or maybe I’m just meeting the wrong people. But seriously – with all of the above examples, if you’re reading this and not judging, then you may consider yourself a saint.

But I don’t believe you.