Getting Over Ourselves
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
~Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur
Getting Over Ourselves
When my son was in preschool, I agreed to join a group of parents chaperoning a trip to the pumpkin patch at a small farm in Fall City.
It was a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, with the trees around us lit up in reds and golds and rows of bright orange pumpkins waiting to be chosen in honor of the Halloween season.
We all loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon lined with dusty bales of hay. We were new to the school, and it was early enough in the year that none of us really knew one another yet. There was that polite, slightly awkward quiet you get when a group of strangers is trying very hard to look relaxed.
And then I saw her.
A tall blond woman sitting at the far end of the wagon, effervescent and a bit boisterous, wearing a turtleneck spotted with little candy corns. In less than five minutes, I had become acutely aware that she was a sales rep for Mary Kay Cosmetics on her way to earning her pink Cadillac.
Oh, please don't come sit next to me, I heard myself think.
It surprised me how fast it came. I didn't know this woman. I didn't even know her name. And yet somewhere between the candy corn and the Mary Kay, I had already written her whole story and decided I wasn't interested in reading it.
As if on cue, she got up, made her way across the wagon, and shimmied into the seat right next to me.
Of course she did.
She introduced herself, and before I knew it, I was walking her through how to bake the delicata squash we had picked up at the farm store. It is very hard to hold a firm position against someone while you are sharing your squash recipe with her.
Try as I might not to like her, I kept gravitating toward her. And, over the years, our sons became close friends, and so did she and I. I even hosted a couple of Mary Kay parties for my friends in the early days.
Every so often, the image of that wagon ride surfaces. What made me judge this amazing person so harshly before she had said a single word to me? Was it the turtleneck, the high-pitched positivity in her voice, or the fact that she sold Mary Kay? Probably some combination of all of it. I don't really know. What I do know is that my judgment was wrong, and it was completely out of alignment with the woman I wanted to be.
In fact, most of it had more to do with me than with her. A new school, a wagon full of strangers, and a part of me that wanted to have everyone sorted before anyone had the chance to sort me.
I see this so often, in the people I work with and in people in general, and I have certainly done my share of it. It is so easy to decide who someone is before we've taken the time to have an actual conversation. We make assumptions based on what a person looks like, or what we think they'll say or do. We base it on the clothes they wear, the car they drive, or where they live.
And we do it most easily with the people closest to us. In our relationships, we leave curiosity out of the conversation entirely and move straight to a verdict. We hear ourselves say he always does this, or she never listens, or I already know how this is going to go, and the conversation is over before it has a chance to begin.
A verdict is efficient. It saves us from being surprised. It also saves us from being wrong, which may be the part we like best. But it costs us something, too. It costs us the person sitting right beside us, the one we never actually met, because we had already decided who she was.
If I'm honest, the verdicts I hand out so quickly look an awful lot like the ones I have handed myself. We do to ourselves what I did on that wagon. We take a turtleneck's worth of information, one hard season, one marriage that ended, one choice we would make differently now, and we decide that is the whole story. We file ourselves under a label and stop asking questions. And whatever is underneath, the part of us that is funnier and braver and far more interesting than the surface suggests, goes unmet, sometimes for years.
That candy corn turtleneck turned out to be the least interesting thing about her. Underneath it was a friend I had nearly dismissed in under five minutes, on a hay wagon in Fall City, on a perfectly beautiful fall day.
I'm grateful she crossed the wagon anyway. And I have come to believe that the best discoveries, about other people and about ourselves, happen right there, in the moment after we get over ourselves and make a little room on the hay bale.
Love and Light,
Copyright © 2026 Michele Heffron Life Strategist, All rights reserved.
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