The sad fact is that most people do not have a clear notion of who you are. Most have not taken the time to get to know you. They do not understand you or how you process. They project themselves and how they process things onto you. They make assumptions about you. They accept/reject you and relate to you based on their notion of you. They judge you because what you do is threatening to them.

They cannot feel your feelings. They do not know how it feels like to be you.

Yet most of us look to others to get information about ourselves. We look to them for validation- to tell us that we are OK. When someone gets mad at us, we assume that we did something wrong. We take it personally. We ask someone out and they say no. Or we flirt with them and they do not respond. We feel rejected. There must be something wrong with us. We make a presentation and someone doesn’t not like it. It must not have been any good. We personalize it.

When someone does not like us or something we do, we are getting information about THEM. It has nothing to with us. It is, however, valuable information about them. We can draw on it to make determinations about what type of relationship and interactions we want to have with them (if any).

But… other people’s perceptions of you is NOT an effective way to get information about yourself- that has to come from you. Another cannot validate who you are; you have to validate yourself. Your estimation of yourself (self esteem) has to come from how YOU feel about how you interacted. You need to evaluate if you feel like you did everything you could to relate clearly to them or connect with them.

Do you feel good about how that went? Maybe you need to adjust how you interact with them. That IS about you. How they respond to you is about them. Let them have it.